The Coming Good Boom

A Philosophy for Compact Living—Introduction

2012-01-10T07:15:00.000-08:00

Energy consuming, spatially expansive living is our dream and passion in the U.S. Yet our compactly developed older cities are experiencing something of a renaissance. This phenomenon is not being driven by any special economic trends, such as dramatically higher energy costs on a European scale that would push people toward denser more energy efficient living. Neither has there been any substantial shift in planning laws, such as a growing use of urban growth boundaries that would force central city infill development and limit suburban expansion. Renewed interest in urban living seems to be occurring on its own, suggesting a shift in attitudes about compact forms of human settlement. This is an especially virtuous event for meeting the challenge of global warming. Because they live at such high densities, New York City residents on average emit less than half the carbon of a typical American. A simple increase in the density of urban settlement in this country would take us a long way toward limiting our greenhouse gas emissions. Transformations in human attitudes have occurred historically, and to find out why this may now be the case for compact living requires us to consider in detail the source of those things we care about most deeply. We need a “philosophy for compact” living rooted in human perceptions of life’s meaning as it relates to how we arrange ourselves spatially in the world.

This will be our task for upcoming posts below. The latest entry will be posted first, but please read the rest in order as you would a book, unlike the usual blog.

A Philosophy for Compact Living: Post-material Values and Saving Nature

2012-01-10T07:11:00.000-08:00

Our essential conclusion so far is this: the rising incidence of post-materialist values among the college-educated young stimulates middle class population growth in high density urban neighborhoods instead of in spatially expansive suburbs. Because residents of high density urban areas emit a lower volume of greenhouse gases than their suburban counterparts, this return of the middle class to the central city helps to retard global warming. In their residential location decisions, post-materialists inadvertently and indirectly help protect the global environment.

Being a post-materialist means that in deciding how to live one goes beyond a narrow focus on private economic interests. The post-materialist desire for individual creativity, shared experience, and a quality environment in which to live are inherently self-transcendent. If post-materialists go further and expand their environmental concerns to the problem of global warming and its consequences for nature, they will likely provide political support for measures that reduce greenhouse gas emissions including those that accelerate trends toward living more compactly. For this reason, it is time to extend our philosophy for compact living to include the natural environment as a whole.

This we will do first at a fairly abstract and ethereal level using the writings of Martin Heidegger. We will then bring all this down to earth with the Aldo Leopold’s land ethic as set out in his classic work, A Sand County Almanac. This will set the stage for summarizing the real world empirical evidence on post-materialist environmental values with an eye to determining their fit with a Leopoldian land ethic. Our final task will be to more fully draw the link between saving nature and living compactly.

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Most of us rarely think about what ‘being in the world’ truly means and leave such questions to academics or theologians. We need to get on with our daily lives where most of the issues we face are pragmatic. For the more ethereal or speculative thinkers among us, to ask about the nature of being is perhaps the most elevated and reverentially tinged of all questions, but also the most difficult to grasp. To emphasize the importance of the question, let’s follow Heidegger and capitalize ‘Being’ just as it is our common practice to capitalize ‘God’ when we speak of beliefs in an ultimate creator. Particular beings include all the phenomenon of human experience—Cormorants diving for fish in Lake Michigan, light reflecting on the water from a morning sun peaking through the clouds, bikers head to work on a bike trail, the taste of espresso, and whatever else enters your consciousness. To make any kind of claim here for a final explanation of the reality we observe each day would be ridiculously pretentious, but we can still postulate one common element without getting into too much philosophical trouble—all these things exist in our field of perception at the moment we observe them. Being in this sense refers to the active presence of an endless array of particular objects and their interconnections, but not to any abstract, and probably unanswerable, questions about ultimate cause. In making this claim, we direct our attention to the perceived as such and to the simple amazement of its existence. This I think is what Heidegger is up to, but I will leave the final judgment about this to you once we summarize some of his philosophical ideas.

Seriously scrutinizing our personal being in the world brings to consciousness the realization that at birth we mysteriously emerge from a state of not existing, and at death we just as mysteriously return to that same state. Anything capturing our interest or affection around us that currently exists just as well could not and, at some point, insofar as we know, will not, causing us still more trepidation about our future prospects. The reality of our eventual death raises the question of what to do with the time we have in this world, and we might think we can avoid the issue by passively adopting a religious faith or some other predigested conception of how to think and live, but a passive choice is still a choice. We have to select one path or another. This can cause us to freeze up in unending anxiety, or to move forward to the future with passion and joy. Or we can just ignore the whole business and trundle on.

For Martin Heidegger, to ask about the nature of Being is indeed the most elevated of all questions, and to seek its answer is to look closely at life as we find it. He grew up in intensely Catholic and conservative early Twentieth Century rural southern Germany where his father was a master cooper and sexton of the local Catholic Church. Heidegger’s education through the university level was paid for by the Church with the expectation that he was destined for the clergy. At the university in Freiburg, he shifted from preparation for the priesthood to the study of Catholic philosophy, receiving a scholarship from the church in support of his work. Heidegger rejected Catholicism soon after World War I and moved on to become a student of the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, gaining a position as a professor at (the Protestant) Marburg University and ultimately succeeding Husserl at Freiburg in 1928. By this time Heidegger’s lectures in philosophy were the stuff of legend in German intellectual circles.

Heidegger published his much anticipated book, Being and Time, in 1927. Here he sets out the work that is to occupy him for the rest of his life, the sorting out of the meaning of being in the world. To a pragmatic thinker, this would seem to be a self-indulgent exercise in abstract theorizing, but what Heidegger attempts to create is a philosophy of everyday life, a task that begins with sorting out the significance of the different objects we encounter in the world. Those that rise to special importance are the “ready-to-hand”: objects that have special importance to us because they are the things we especially need and desire. They are the tools of existence—hammers, plows, houses, computers, cups and saucers, coats and pants, guitars, baseballs, and so on. The rest of the things we encounter, the “present-at-hand”, occur in the background of our lives and fail to attract our attention because we don’t care much about them—beetles, sphagnum moss on forest trees, boulders, discarded plastic bags. To list such items poses a challenge because we tend to ignore what doesn’t concern us. Who we are and what we do in the world has much to do with how we treat the objects we encounter. Something of little interest to us at one point in our life may take on a special significance at another; a rock of a certain size becomes important to me when I want to pound tent stakes into the ground on backpacking trips. We approach any object in our attention span with “circumspection”. How can we use it? Will it harm us in some way? Is it pleasing? How does it function? What does it do? What is its being about? How do I avoid it or get around it?

Given the social nature of human experience, our encounters with human-others, as opposed to objects, takes on a special significance, or “being-with.” One’s everyday life consists of a complex of interrelationships with others—spouses, children, grocers, car mechanics, beauticians, baristas, friends, lovers, fellow workers, softball teammates. We approach these individuals with “solicitude.” How do others react to my behavior? Do I trust someone? Am I sexually attracted to a particular person? Is my softball teammate a skilled player? Does this barista make really good espresso? How can I help my son become less depressed? Is the police officer following me going to give me a ticket? Will I be assaulted if a go into a particular neighborhood? Will my friends be at the coffee shop today?

The vast majority of our relations in the world, both with humans and nonhuman objects, take on an ordinary quality, or “everydayness.” I get up, have breakfast with my wife, maybe talk about plans for the day, read some of the newspaper, go exercise, head to the coffee shop, haul out my computer to do some writing (I am retired), go home for lunch, chat and gossip with people I know at another coffee shop, read some philosophy, shop at the grocery store, fix dinner, talk about my day with my wife, and so on. These are the repetitive, ordinary tasks of daily existence. In them, one life looks much like another; nothing distinguishes us or causes us to stand out. We gain enjoyment from many of these activities and connections, although not all. I love conversing with friends on the horrible state of politics or the economy, or talking to the barista about the finer points of making espresso, but I am not so keen about calming my son’s anxieties around having to learn college level economic theory, or having to speak with a neighbor about a dent I put in his car when backing out of my driveway. I enjoy fixing dinner and having a glass of wine while doing so, and I like catching the evening news. Some of what we do may be quite boring, although necessary to daily life—washing the dishes, getting the laundry done, painting the deck, commuting on a congested expressway to work, serving the fiftieth cup of coffee to our customers at work, and numerous other tasks you can imagine for yourself. Of course boredom and its lack is partly a matter of taste—I thoroughly enjoy hanging laundry outdoors on a summer’s day, something many think to be intrinsically mundane.

You may bridle at the idea that the ordinary experiences that take up much of our earthly existence are “inauthentic”, but that’s what Heidegger calls them. He does this not to denigrate the ordinary. After all, most of the events of our life are pretty ordinary, but that doesn’t mean they are unnecessary or that the don’t bring us joy. I love my daily espresso, but that doesn’t mean it is anything special in the bigger scheme of things. Ordinary life can be good, but it isn’t what gives us our unique identity. What does this is the “authentic”, that generally rare kind of activity that causes us to stand out from the crowd and puts into practice our own, self-determined philosophy of life. To live fully, is to both live in everyday inauthenticity and to express one’s idiosyncratic and “authentic” self.

The essential human motivation underlying both the everyday and the authentic is “care.” As already noted, we approach life with circumspection, concern, and solicitousness. We care about those things and those persons in the environment around us that we take as important. We fear having the things we need and the people close to us torn away. There is nothing necessarily altruistic in the idea of care. Care can be about the self; one can care deeply about avoiding muggers lying in wait in dark alleys, or a homeless person can feel serious concern about where her next meal will come from; or care can be for the well-being of others close to us, or for the place or community in which we live, or for things in the natural world we have come to love like wildflowers and beautiful landscapes. Care is an existential feature of life. I care; therefore I am.

Closely related to care is the idea of “anxiety”. Anxiousness is a kind of nebulous fear about not-being, about being a nothing rather than a something. One goes through daily life without thinking much about nonexistence, but in reflective moments one suddenly becomes fearful of not living, or, more to the point, not having lived in any significant way. We become worried about living mundanely and inauthentically and sinking into the obscurity of the average in our daily being. This is the source of our inherent, if often hidden, desire to go beyond everydayness and seek something authentic. Anxiety generates a particular form of care—a special concern about having a personal existence that is uniquely valuable. Recognizing the possibility of “not being” creates anxiety about finitude in our lives, but its flip side, the mere fact that beings exist, can also create “astonishment” and wonder. Such astonishment is as fundamental as anxiety. We awake each day with a feeling of anxiousness about what it is we should do, or with a feeling of amazement that we exist in a world where the sun shines through our window, or maybe both. Out of our conflicting emotions, we carve out a balance between care for everydayness and a passion for something special capable of dampening our existential anxiousness, that is if we are both resolute and lucky.

Authenticity in its essence is subjective. We can debate about what an authentic life is like, but we cannot establish final standards to describe it. One can speak of authenticity in a general way, but not be able to say for sure if this or that person attains it. Whether one’s own actions are authentic is a matter of reflective, honest self-judgment. We can, and do in our public discourse, look at the lives of others and argue about the character of their actions. Read newspapers, websites, and advertisements—most say something about questions of personal authenticity. People whose lives have authentic elements get written about, but not so much those stuck in a inauthenticity. Who would admit to living a mundane life of total everydayness? People do own up to unhappiness in the extensive survey research on the subject, but do unhappiness and inauthenticity go together? One can be dumb and happy, as the saying goes, one could be inauthentic and happy as well, or even authentic and miserable. The best way to describe the authentic is that unique part of our own life that we pursue as a matter of passion and special commitment. The authentic rises above the mundane and becomes a special kind of activity, an act of free expression. This doesn’t mean that we escape everydayness in our existence; it simply means that at some moments we engage in something more. We are all moved to live authentically, but some no doubt do this more successfully than others. This is why we take such an interest in the topic. We all in some way want to stand out and express our own individuality, but we also enjoy submerging ourselves into the comforting routine of our everyday being.

To live authentically requires some degree of freedom in choosing what to do in one’s life and how to spend one’s time, and the extent of such freedom available to each of us is fundamentally an economic question. To follow our personal predilections and creative projects, we need to be well fed and clothed, adequately housed, and sufficiently funded for the simple pleasures of life, and we need the resources to pursue our private ends—artists require materials and a studio, soccer players a field and equipment, environmentalists or antiabortionists funds and volunteers for political action, writers libraries, actors and singers theaters, and conservationists undisturbed landscapes. Most of all, we need time for our chosen life’s mission, either in our paid work (say as a wildlife ecologist) or away from it (say spending weekends restoring a tallgrass prairie on an old farm).

Both everydayness and authenticity exist in the context of concrete daily existence and thus possess “historicality.” To speak about history from the individual’s perspective is to talk about a unified self that exists over time. At the core of our identity is a selfsameness we create by knitting together sequences of experiences into a kind of personal narrative. We desperately want to have a story we can tell others that expresses the meaning of our particular existence. This is how we become historical.

For the most part, we exist in the context of the facts of history. Our possibilities are given to us by what history delivers up. We are tossed into a world not of our making. From this world, we can behave resolutely and rise above everydayness by committing ourselves to a certain heritage or tradition, a certain set of practices that has stood the test of time. We are compelled by fate to take the plate we are given, but we can choose what we take from it. In short, we can’t alter history writ large, but we can shape our own personal fate.

In accepting a tradition we buy into a certain vision of how a particular kind of life should be lived. Some traditions deserve to die, even to be destroyed. Choosing from history’s plate can be exceedingly dangerous without an intense and open public debate about what should be rejected out of hand. Any tradition with the clear potential to demean, enslave, and destroy human and other natural beings on its face is a candidate for such rejection. Heidegger himself flirted with Nazism, a mistake most scholars say he has tragically failed to fully acknowledge. We as human individuals choose from what we are given, commit ourselves to certain traditions and values, shape and alter them to the degree that we can, and pass them on. One can unquestioningly and inauthentically accept the prevailing popular conceptions of culture, or one can actively and authentically seek to carve out one’s own unique interpretation of how life ought to be lived. This doesn’t mean totally rejecting the offering of history but taking it as a starting point for creative and idiosyncratic departures. The ultimate requirement for doing this is reasonable practical freedom and the ultimate responsibility is to avoid harm to others and work to expand the freedom of all for authentic pursuits. Heidegger hues more closely to the offerings of history in his discussions of how to live than, say, Nietzsche. As we found out above, the free-spirited Nietzsche is quick to reject historical traditions lacking functionality in the modern world and argues for the creation of new social practices that serve human creativity.

Productive and creative acts in Heidegger’s eyes originate not just in human endeavors, but start from nature itself. In high mountain meadows when the snow melts in spring plants emerge from the soil, leaf out to draw energy from the sun, and push forth beautiful flowers to attract bees or hummingbirds that will move pollen from one plant to another thereby activating the reproductive process that will assure a next generation of plants. Human creative activity simply helps along what is already latent in the world of nature. A piece of fine-grained wooden furniture emerges through the work of an artisan from the wood of a large, old tree cut from the forests. Crops spring forth from soils sown by human hand but driven by the energy of the sun. The work of a sculptor unfolds a statue from a large piece of marble created by the forces of nature. The power of the wind turns a windmill placed in its path to generate electricity for human use. What human beings do in their everyday working life helps nature along in the creation of objects of utility and value. Humanity and nature act together as partners in an ecological world to create those material objects that satisfy human wants and desires.

Such a naturalized, and some might say romanticized, view of human productive activity on its face has little to do with the reality of the modern industrial society where resources ready-to-hand are forcibly extracted from nature and chemically and mechanically recombined into objects of utility with little thought given to their creative origins. In the modern industrial world everything becomes strictly a resource, a standing-stock, and this includes human activity. Human beings direct the process of cranking out powerful motor vehicles, cell phones, laptops, digital sounds and images, and ready-to-eat fast food, but they also functions as cogs in the gears of production. We may feel in control of the assembly system for Ford Explorers or applications for Apple ipads, but in practice the underlying technology is a legacy of a long string of scientific discoveries, engineering achievements, and business practices. At any given point in history we are given the technological system available and can tweak it at the margins, but cannot invent it totally anew. In short, we each become but a small piece in a historically given technical and economic system that each of us individually is powerless to alter. Now there is nothing wrong with being both an object within, and a subject who directs, productive activity—after all this is what humans have done in most of their waking hours throughout history. The real issue is whether technology and the economy take over our entire living being, or whether we recognize and enjoy a life and a world beyond the purely economic. To cave into the strictly economic in Martin Heidegger’s view is to confine oneself to inauthenticity. Instead we should look beyond the economic horizon to a larger world of natural marvels with an existence of its own to which we owe an obligation of concern and care. The trap of the modern age is a total human absorption in the amazements that modern technology produces and the ignoring of the even greater amazements that lie beyond the human economic skin. How does one avoid the trap?

The antidote to such an inauthentic economic reality is to somehow change our daily work routine to allow us to experience and celebrate the world as a fragile, precious, and wondrous place. Technology needn’t be an independent, overpowering force so long as we organize it in such a way as to respect nature’s own unfolding and wonders, to see our own actions as the completion of a larger natural process, and to allow our creative impulses to be realized in the production of items, not just of human value, but that connect us to the marvels of Being itself. We all indeed are resources, but we are more than that. We have the privilege of being able to contemplate the world around us and find in it meaning and beauty. The answer to economic and technological dominance is not Luddism, but to instead transform the economy and technology and render it secondary to the sacredness of existence and beings. One can make use of science and technology without intervening in natural processes for the sole purpose of controlling and exploiting them. Similarly, one can function in the economic arena without disregarding the creative impulses, both natural and human in origin.

Despite such possibilities, technological and economic predominance in our lives is more a matter of fate rather than personal desire according to Heidegger. None of us have explicitly chosen the economic world we live in. It has simply emerged as a product of the small actions of millions of people over a long span of time. Modernity, where everything is a pure resource and our energies go into endless rounds of producing and consuming, holds sway as a matter of current historical destiny, but this needn’t rule out a different future. Treating everything as a pure resource and being stuck on an economic treadmill isn’t inevitable. While we individually lack the capacity for implementing a new economic vision society-wide, we do have a degree of personal choice in the way we live. We can in our daily life move beyond entrapment in consumerism and technology and reintroduce the mystery of Being into our actions. This would fail as a “world turning,” a total revolutionary change in human arrangements, but we can individually at as “free spirits” who live unconventionally, demonstrating to others the possibility of a personal turning to a new way of being. Eventually, the political weight of those who follow a different vision could be enough to politically create a larger move to new arrangements that allow for a more authentic mode of worldly existence. Living one’s values in such circumstances inadvertently shapes a larger destiny and could be akin to a communicable virus that can move at lightening speed. The Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions brought forth by “youthful free spirits” attuned to modern communication technology suggests the possibility of a quick and radical turn to a democratic future and away from autocratic rule. How this new movement will pan out remains to be seen, but for the moment fatalism has died in the Middle East.

To move beyond a life where the economy holds sway requires something to move towards, which we can discover by expanding our perceptual horizons to take in the idea of dwelling—living in the world in a truly human manner—an idea that Heidegger develops in his later writings. To dwell is to feel safe and cared for in the place where one resides, and to actively care for those others and things that make up this place. To care for something is to passively and actively let it be, to let it unfold itself in accordance with its own nature. In short, we should tune into the wonders of all those beings around us in our dwelling place and extend our care to them as manifestations of the marvels and mystery of existence.

The everyday meaning of the term ‘dwelling’ is to live in a locality, a place in close proximity to work, schools, shopping and entertainment, and friends. Dwelling takes on a deeper significance when we do more than just reside in a locality but feel special emotional ties to its environment and way of life. In the presence of such ties, our expressions of care will take form as letting local dwellers seek their self-creative paths through life, a town or city develop according to community needs, architecture fit the aesthetic and natural features of the local landscape, a river follow its own created path, and native flora and fauna play out their evolved natural relationships. To dwell in a deeper sense doesn’t mean we forego treating beings as resources—we need resources to live—but to recognize that they possess value and interest in their own right regardless of their resource status.

Dwelling takes more specific form by thinking in terms of the “fourfold”: earth, sky, mortals, and divinities (This is the special language of Martin Heidegger’s later writings.) Earth and sky refer to our natural environment as a whole including all its living and nonliving beings and their interconnections. Mortals as one of the fourfold refers not only to our membership as citizens of a larger ecological community, but also to our special presence as self-conscious, thinking, mortal, social beings who have the special capacity to question the meaning of all that we encounter. The final piece of the fourfold, and perhaps the hardest to understand, is the divinities. One’s immediate reaction would be to interpret these as the gods of organized religions, but this is not solely what Heidegger means. Rather the divine constitutes an unwritten community ethos manifested in the lives of its cultural heroes. Heroes lack divinity in the ordinary religious sense, but they embody in their histories and outlooks values that we hold dear—freedom, justice, courage, care, and generosity. Against our heroes, we judge the content of our own lives. The idea of divinities as framing our lives contains a second more intangible element, an attitude of sacredness towards all of being.

In any lament of the modern condition and its absence of authentic dwelling, technology takes center stage. Technology itself today is encased in a larger economic system fired by constant innovation that in turn leads to perpetual expansion of the whole. The driving force is not just technology itself, but an extensive media apparatus that entices human consumers to the latest gadgets or symbols of beauty, power, or status that technological forces create. In this arrangement, the powers of technology get directed to stimulating and fulfilling the siren song of consumer craving and satisfaction.

To find authentic meaning and to dwell fully in the world, Heidegger believes we need to look beyond the horizons created by technology and the economy. To illustrate his meaning, he contrasts the constructing of a bridge and a dam. Building a well-designed bridge to connect two riverbanks and their associated landscapes and human communities is an act of dwelling that preserves a river’s natural flow and provides a setting that can inspire thoughts of our larger connections to humanity and nature, earth and sky. Building a dam that converts a flowing river into a lake runs counter to authentic dwelling by unnecessarily destroying a natural being. Today electric energy can alternatively be generated by the blowing wind or the shining sun. One needn’t irrevocably harm the processes of nature in the use of it as a resource. We don’t need to be Luddites to save nature’s wonders.

One can never fully understand the infinity of forces behind the natural wonders we see within our horizon of perception and we don’t need to. But we can approach such an infinity with wonder and we can restrain our impulse to shape nature’s treasures to our own liking. This is how we can ultimately act as true stewards of Being and truly dwell in the world, according to Heidegger’s late philosophical writings.

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Admittedly, Martin Heidegger’s language and ideas possess an etherial quality that hard-nosed, technology oriented post-materialists might find challenging to accept. One of my heroes, Aldo Leopold, worked his full life to realize values and purposes closely akin to those described in Heidegger’s late philosophy. Leopold, a pioneer in the field of game management, gained iconic status among environmentalists for the simplicity and clarity of his ‘land ethic’ set out in Sand County Almanac, a book that did not see publication until after his death in 1948 while fighting a brushfire on a neighbor’s farm. The book begins by taking the reader month-by-month through the seasonal changes on a played-out ‘sand farm’ in central Wisconsin, the Leopold’s family refuge from modernity. Leopold describes in his own quietly eloquent way the natural history of a very small and insignificant piece of our world. He brings to life the inner workings of nature on a landscape that probably would otherwise escape our attention. Few of us will ever notice the evening sky dance of a woodcock, a chunky shorebird, who begins the ritual with a few struts and calls in an open, sandy area free of tall grasses and then takes off spiraling upward with the wind in his wings creating a twittering sound and then goes into a dive, pulling out just a few feet above ground, all to impress a lady. Nor will we ever think about how the demise of diseased trees in our woods fortuitously creates habitats for wildlife, such as winter cover for roughed grouse provided by a downed oak with leaves still intact, or a protected nesting site for wood ducks in hollowed out standing snags. Such attention to the details of nature’s functioning exhibits a deep sense of love and concern for what is being observed. Leopold summarizes these feelings more formally in his ‘land ethic’, which “...simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” In short, the land ethic brings the natural world into our circle of concern and care. Whatever one might think about a land ethic, the life and thought of Aldo Leopold provides us with a practical example of pondering and exploring what our presence in the world entails, and he does so through an earthy and pragmatic lens as opposed to the esoteric language of philosophy as we will now see.

For much of its history, the timber industry practiced cut and run forestry. Timber companies, like Weyerhaeuser, cut down all trees of value in one part of the country, such as the upper Great Lakes, and moved on to virgin timber in another, such as the Pacific Northwest. This practice raised fears in the 1890s of a future timber famine, spurring the withdrawal of forestlands from public sale by the federal government. In 1905 the federal government transferred 100 million acres of forestland to the jurisdiction of the newly created U.S. Forest Service led by Gifford Pinchot, a charismatic advocate for the wise use of the nations forest and grazing lands. Lands under the Forest Service’s jurisdiction were to be managed for watershed protection, the sustained-yield production of timber, and sustainable grazing.

Into this new world of forest management entered Aldo Leopold. Leopold graduated with a masters degree from the Yale Forest School in 1909 and took a job with the U.S. Forest Service in the newly formed Southwestern District covering Arizona and New Mexico territories. He quickly advanced to the position of supervisor for the Carson National Forest, but a severe inflammation of his knees, caused by being caught in a flood followed by a blizzard while settling a grazing dispute, sidelined him for eighteen months after which he got himself reassigned to game management in the Southwestern District. Leopold’s vision for game management at the time called for the perpetuation of sport hunting through the organization of game protection groups, strict enforcement of game laws, eradication of predators, creation of game refuges, and the rehabilitation and restocking of depleted habitats. He argued vigorously that flourishing populations of fishable and huntable game would bring an economic boon to the Southwest driven by growth in outdoor recreation. The U.S. Forest Service, in his view, should be charged to pursue not only the sustainable production of timber, but also self-perpetuating flows of harvestable wildlife as well. Influenced by the Forest Service ideology of the day, sustained yield formed the essential premise of Leopold’s early philosophy of game management. More game animals would be available for the hunter by eradicating predators, such as mountain lions, wolves, and coyotes. This conclusion led Leopold to argue that both stockmen and wildlife advocates should join together in cooperative efforts to eliminate such common enemies. Leopold’s thinking on the topic of predators, we will see, undergoes a remarkable transformation over his career in game management.

Ecological science came of age in Leopold’s lifetime and deeply influenced his understanding of the natural world in which he practiced his profession. Leopold in his own quiet but resolute manner became a ‘free spirit’ in his interpretation of the relationship between human beings and nature. He adopted and helped develop a new way of thinking about biotic organisms and their environment, or as he called it, the land. The new science of ecology as envisioned by Leopold harkens back to a time when existence, with all its complexities and mysteries, was looked at with wonder and awe. Leopold soon discovered that such beliefs suffer at the hands of a utilitarian perspective in a modern industrial society that treats nature and its organisms strictly as a means for the satisfaction of human material ends.

Leopold doesn’t come to his new perspective overnight, especially in his own adopted profession of game management. At the same time he was still advocating for varmint control as a means to sustain huntable game populations, he developed an innovative framework for understanding the relationship between grasslands and forests that relies on the most advanced ecological thinking of the day. Conventional wisdom in the 1920s held that the worst event possible for soil erosion in the Southwest was fire and that preventing fire would limit erosion. Through astute observation, Leopold concluded that prior to human settlement grass predominated where brush had taken over 40 years later. With settlement, grazing suppressed both grass and fire, and brush invaded. At the same, time erosion of watercourses increased. With grass and stream-side willows removed by grazing, floods scoured out and eroded waterways. Historically, grass brought fire to the hills and removed any invading brush. Grass quickly recovered and outcompeted shrubs and tree saplings, keeping much of the land open and and upland tall forests with fire-resistant mature trees in a park-like, shrub-free condition. Grass and willows in stream floodplains worked together to limit erosion, and, by retaining land in grass, fire indirectly facilitated erosion control. This was Leopold’s conclusion in his 1924 pathbreaking article, “Grass, Brush, Timber, and Fire in Southern Arizona” published in the Journal of Forestry.

A year previously, Leopold in an unpublished piece, “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest,” goes much farther than ever before in raising moral questions about humanity’s relationship to nature. He refers both to biblical passages and to the works of a Russian philosopher, Peter Ouspensky, in speculating that the earth itself is “an organism possessing a certain kind and degree of life, which we intuitively respect as such.” Leopold argues for looking at the earth not as an inanimate object, but as a living being whose parts—the atmosphere, soils, waters, flora, and fauna—function much like organs in the human body. Such contemplations raised for Leopold a deeper question about whether the earth exists solely for human exploitation or whether we ought to view ourselves as its temporary possessors with a responsibility to pass it along to the future undamaged. Given the instrumentalist outlook of the time, Leopold unsurprisingly kept these thoughts to himself, but they do offer a preview of what’s to come in his personal philosophy.

While his conclusions on the causes of soil erosion played a role shaping his early ecological thinking, deer population management turned out to be the most emotional and controversial issue facing Leopold over his career from his early days in the Southwest through his appointment as the chair of the University of Wisconsin’s newly created department of game management in 1933 and beyond. Leopold’s experience of deer irruptions—virtual explosions in deer populations—first in the Southwest and later in Wisconsin, deeply affected his conception of the relationship between deer, the landscape they occupy, and their predators. As already noted, conventional wisdom held that predators such as wolves and mountain lions required eradicated to insure a huntable surplus of deer and that expansion of hunting seasons will take care of any deer population excesses. Rather than the availability of browse controlling deer populations, Leopold observed that deer through over-browsing can profoundly alter the species composition and biological diversity of the habitats they occupy. He saw this early on with deer eruptions in both New Mexico and Arizona, and in his later work as a game commissioner in Wisconsin. He had trouble convincing Wisconsinites in the 1940s that deer overpopulation was harming the state’s recovering forests, and that relaxed hunting regulations and a increased kill were essential to controlling population. The absence of natural predators because of the prior eradication of wolves in the state made expanded deer hunting an even greater imperative.

In his Sand Country Almanac, Leopold summarizes his own intellectual transformation in an essay, “Thinking Like a Mountain.” He traces the beginning of his change in thinking back to watching life flicker out in a dying wolf’s eyes. He and a companion, young and full of “trigger-itch”, shot several grown wolf pups and an old female in the mountainous backcountry of the Southwest. As Leopold puts it, “We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.” In those days, “fewer wolves meant more deer” and “no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise.” After seeing the wolf die, Leopold “sensed that neither the wolf or the mountain agreed with such a view.” No wolves means more deer who eat all the palatable browse within reach and chomp off the top of seedlings meant to sustain a mountain’s tree populations. “Just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer.” By looking at the interaction of deer, wolves, and vegetation from the perspective of the land itself, Leopold acquired a new, more realistic view of how the natural world functions. This was a critical step in Leopold’s ultimate extension of his ecological and moral thinking to encompass the totality of the biotic universe.

His initial reluctance to speak out publicly about a moral responsibility to the whole of nature disappears in a 1933 address to the American Association of the Advancement of Science, “The Conservation Ethic,” published in the Journal of Forestry. Fifteen years later, this essay becomes the basis of “The Land Ethic” in Sand County Almanac. Leopold advocates for treating nature as not just a resource for our use, but as a self-organizing being having value for its own sake. He recognizes the necessity of using nature’s resources for human material needs but believes that landowners have a responsibility—one requiring government support and encouragement—to conserve landscapes in their totality including organisms lacking in economic value. We all spend our lives in a human community that entails ethical commitments to other members. “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of that community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” If we expand our community in this fashion, we will treat the world of nature not just as a means to our material satisfactions, but as an end in itself. Just as human ethics assumes respect and affection for our fellow human beings, a land ethic requires the same for the rest of the natural world. In other words, a land ethic presumes ecological knowledge and an admiration, respect, and even love for the wonders of nature. This leads Leopold to the following standard: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” Leopold also claims that “No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions.”

Aldo Leopold suffered few illusions that a land ethic would easily find wide acceptance within the conventional wisdom of his day. Peppered throughout his writings one finds descriptive and critical comments on the accepted mode of modern life and its underlying premises. Early in his career, he expressed concern with the extension of roads into every last bit of wilderness and the lost opportunity to experience the land as our pioneers saw it. In a 1924 essay, “The River of the Mother of God,” gives us a flavor of the problem he sees with roads:

The thing that is choking out the wilderness is not true economics at all, but the Frankenstein which our boosters have built, the “Good Roads Movement.” This movement, entirely sound and beneficial in its inception, has been boosted until it resembles a gold-rush, with about the same regard for ethics and good craftsmanship. The spilled treasures of Nature and of the Government seem to incite about the same kind of stampede in the human mind. In this case the yellow is the Motor Tourist. Like Mammon, he must now be spelled with a capital, and as with Mammon, we grovel at his feet, and rules us with the insolence characteristic of a new god. We offer up our groves and greenswards for him to camp upon, and he litters them with cans and with rubbish. We hand him our wild life and our wild flowers, and humbly continue to gesture after there are none left to hand. But of all the offerings foolish roads are to him the most pleasing of sacrifice.

Leopold is no wilderness protection elitist. In commenting on U.S. Forest Service recreation policy, he recognizes that the majority of our citizens “undoubtedly want all the automobile roads, summer hotels, graded trails, and other modern conveniences we can give them.” Agreeing that “they shall have these things as rapidly as brains and money can provide them,” he goes on to say that “a very substantial minority, I think, want just the opposite.” A minority want not the comforts and conveniences of a modern consumer economy, but a more basic and challenging connection to the forces of nature.

By the time of his 1934 essay, “The Conservation Ethic,” Leopold directs his concerns about modern economic reality to not just wilderness protection, but to land and nature in its entirety:

We of the machine age admire ourselves for our mechanical ingenuity; we harness cars to the solar energy impounded in carboniferous forests; we fly in mechanical birds; we make the ether carry our worlds or even our pictures. But are these not in one sense mere parlor tricks compared with our utter ineptitude in keeping land fit to live upon? Our engineering has attained the pearl gates of a near-millennium, but our applied biology still lives in nomad’s tents of the stone age. If our system of land-use happens to be self-perpetuating, we stay. If it happens to be self-destructive we move, like Abraham, to pastures new.

As nearly as I can see, all the new isms—Socialism, Communism, Fascism, and especially the late but not lamented Technocracy—outdo even Capitalism itself in their preoccupation with one thing: The distribution of more machine-made commodities to more people. They all proceed on the theory that if we can keep warm and full, and all own a Ford and a radio, the good life will follow. Their programs differ only in ways to mobilize machines to this end. Though they despise each other, they are all, in respect of this objective, as identically alike as peas in a pod. They are competitive apostles of a single creed: salvation by machinery. We are here concerned, not with their proposals for adjusting men and machines to goods, but rather their lack of any vital proposal for adjusting men and machines to land.

Leopold packs a lot into these remarks. He admires the technological capacity of the modern age but he sees the human enthrallment with economic materiality, no matter what its ideological basis, as destructive of the wonders of nonhuman nature. When it comes to our treatment of the land, we are human bulls in a resilient by not indestructible china shop.

Despite his pessimistic tone about the ecological harms imposed by economic realities, Leopold avoids the rhetoric of a revolutionary. He holds a pragmatic belief that the seeds of change can be implanted in society, and in time human perceptions of the moral community can be expanded to include the whole of nature. In his work as a wildlife ecologist, Leopold constantly searched for practical measures that would achieve conservation goals within the prevailing economic framework and always sought to bring ecological enlightenment to the public. In formulating a policy statement for the 1930 Game Conference, Leopold argued for compensating landowners to improve wildlife habitat and create food resources for game populations. In short, he argued that landowners should become game managers. In 1934 he wrote an article about a cooperative effort of Wisconsin sportsmen and a number of farmers to make simple habitat improvements for the purpose of increasing game populations. In 1935 he described work by the newly formed U.S. Soil Conservation Service in Wisconsin’s Coon Valley, where integrated plans to stem erosion and improve wildlife habitat were carried out with the help the Civilian Conservation Corp and the enthusiastic participation of local farmers. In response to accusations that he lacked a real commitment to wildlife preservation, Leopold wrote the following defense of his pragmatic approach to conservation:

...Mr. McCabe’s game policy, whether he realizes it or not, consists of a system of personal wishes which might be realized if American consisted of 120 million ornithologists, whereas mine is a system of proposed public actions designed to fit the unpleasant fact that America consists largely of business men, farmers, and Rotarians, busily playing the national game of economic expansion.

What to do? I see only two courses open to the likes of us. One is to go live on locusts in the wilderness, if there is any wilderness left. The other is surreptitiously to set up within the economic Juggernaut certain new cogs and wheels whereby the residual love of nature, inherent even in Rotarians, may be made to recreate at least a fraction of those values which their love of “progress” is destroying. A briefer way to put it is: if we want Mr Babbitt to rebuild outdoor America, we must let him use the same tools wherewith he destroyed it.

Does Mr. McCabe know a way to induce the average farmer to leave the birds some food and cover without paying him for it? To raise the fund for such payment without in some way taxing sportsmen?

Let me admit that my cogs and wheels are designed to perpetuate wild life to shoot, as well as wild life to look at. This is because I believe that hunting takes rank with agriculture and nature study as one of three fundamentally valuable human contacts with the soil. Secondly, because hunting revenues offer the only available “coin of the realm” for buying from Mr. Babbitt the environmental modifications necessary to offset the inroads of industry.

One gets the feeling that Leopold would like to see an entirely different scheme of values with a broader vision of what’s important in life, but he clearly recognizes that this is a long term project. He advocates for a more strategic and covert approach to wildlife conservation that in the long haul just might bring about a transformation of human attitudes toward natural landscapes.

Aldo Leopold in his personal life took dwelling as an act of care seriously. His weekends and vacations in his later years were taken up with the ecological restoration of his Wisconsin ‘sand farm’ that had suffered at the hands of a previous owner desperate to eke out an economic existence in an unsuitable landscape. Despite the difficulties of farming successfully in the Sand Counties, Leopold finds a reluctance among the locals to give up the struggle and move on. Something else other than economics must keep people on these lands, and Leopold speculates that this something inheres in the place itself. He sees a parallel between the resilience of locals who remain and wildflowers such as the ground-hugging Pasqueflower, Draba, and Sandwort who find openness and barrenness to be a special advantage. It is these things that Leopold cares for in his efforts to protect and restore the land. To plant a pine in the Sand Counties for Leopold is a noble act of bring back a plant to its natural home. Pines love sand. “To plant a pine...one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a shovel.” In the ordinary features of the land community Leopold finds his simple inspiration for care of the earth.Leopold possessed no illusions about the destructiveness of modern technology for the natural world. In farming and elsewhere the march of technology and economic exploitation causes the retreat of numerous native plant and animal species, a phenomenon documented in Leopold’s own natural history writings. A Sand County farm for the purpose of ecological restoration work could be affordably obtained by Leopold only because of its economic worthlessness. To get beyond the encasing of the natural world within economics, new attitudes and values are required, what Leopold refers to as an “ecological consciousness.” We need to expand our horizons of Being to “[include] the soil, waters, fauna, and flora, as well as people.” In his teaching, writing, and work as a conservationist, Leopold labored to accomplish such an expanding. This was his ultimate form of dwelling and care for the world in which he lived, something Martin Heidegger might have admired as an authentic human act, one that advances the stewardship of Being.

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The land ethic in its simplest form means expanding our concern for the world around us to include life as a whole, not just the human piece of it. The environmental movement birthed in the 1960s attempts to do just this and has become an active political force in the last fifty years. Our environmental laws, such as the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species Acts, date from the 1970s and represent early political victories for environmentalism. Researchers have established that a rise in post-materialist values contributes to a public desire for action on environmental problems. In survey research one can ask respondents whether they support measures that improve the quality of the environment, but many will give a positive response simply because a clean environment is a good thing just like loving one’s mother or supporting your local baseball team. Alternatively, to get at the depth of support for environmental improvement, one can ask respondents instead about their willingness to make actual financial sacrifices, such as paying more taxes, for a reduction in environmental degradation. Studies taking this approach find that post-materialists express a greater willingness to pay for environmental improvement than their materialist counterparts. A post-materialist outlook retains this positive impact on support for environmental improvement even after personal income and education are taken into account. A higher income makes sacrifices for the environment more affordable, and a higher educational attainment helps increase awareness of environmental problems, but one’s philosophical outlook makes a difference in political support for the environment as well. To the degree post-materialism gains in popularity so will support for environmental improvement.

The ecological approach to environmental values taken by Aldo Leopold seems to be infiltrating public perceptions. Historically, public understanding of environmental issues such as air or water pollution entered the public consciousness as a matter of personal experience. In the 1960s, air pollution in the Los Angeles basin and other urban areas was palpable as was water pollution in Lake Erie or the Cuyahoga River famous for actually catching on fire. The less perceptible but no less serious problem of climate change is more difficult to grasp. We can’t visually observe the buildup of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere and have to rely on scientific explanations of the problem to know of its existence. Yet public knowledge of climate change’s consequences seems to be on the rise. Images of polar bears adrift on small melting ice flows tell a story of climate-induced habitat loss that few can miss. Aldo Leopold devoted much of his working life to explaining the horrors of deer population irruptions to Wisconsin’s citizenry, and awareness of this issue among them is now widespread. As Leopold hoped for, ecological knowledge is on the rise informing both public discourse on environmental issues and individual decisions about how to order one’s life, and as Leopold tells us, “We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.” A keystone for the care of nature’s treasures is an ecological conscience, towards which post-materialist values look to be taking us.

Post-materialists help fuel the trend to central city living as a consequence of their desire to live in walkable, older neighborhoods and in close proximity to experience-oriented cultural attractions. The realization that compact living brings with it environmental virtues, such as reduced greenhouse gas emissions, gives post-materialists added, ethically-oriented motivations to choose central city over suburban living. Post-materialists also appears to be behind public support for measures to limit carbon emissions and forestall climate change, and to the extent that such measures increase the cost of fossil fuel energy, spatially compact central cities will gain a competitive advantage as a place to live relative to more energy inefficient, spatially expansive suburbs.

On top of growing public understanding of the climate change issue, local ecological aware residents increasingly support land protection measures that conserve rare and endangered species and indirectly encourage compact forms of development. The citizens of Tucson, Arizona, recognizing the potential for suburban development to gobble up Sonoran Desert habitat needed by threatened species, recently passed bond measures that publicly fund land protection in environmentally valuable local landscapes. Land trusts in the Madison, Wisconsin area are working hard to restraint westward suburban development and protect rural landscapes used by rare grassland bird species. These are but two examples where urban spatial compactness directly leaves more space for nature’s biological treasures.

Despite positive historical post-materialist trends, a full public understanding of climate change and its seriousness lies somewhere in the future. Public opinion surveys find that many respondents still deny the presence or seriousness of global warming. Because the trend to post-materialism is driven by generational replacement and increases in educational attainment, its advance is steady but slow. Whether rising post-materialist environmental awareness will be enough to restrain climate change in time remains to be seen.

A Philosophy for Compact Living—Meaning, Materialism, and the Suburban Dream

2011-11-09T14:54:00.000-08:00

The quest by philosophers for a singular and final explanation of the meaning of life has been largely given up as a fruitless exercise. Instead, we are left to deal with this task on our own. Most of us say that we believe in God, and that religion takes care of all questions of ultimate meaning. The trouble with this kind of response for us in the U.S. is that we pay lip service to religion, but then what we really do is go to the mall. We are materialists, body and soul, through and through, and we live accordingly. We find our meaning not in the heavens, but in goods. As materialists we believe that the singular purpose in life is to gain access to financial resources and to use them to acquire material possessions. Accomplishing this purpose is our passion in life. Our temples are the the Mall of America and Amazon.com. Meaning in life comes from adopting purposes and values about which we care passionately and pursuing them through actions in the world, and the predominant form of meaning today is deeply materialist.

Our dream of where to live for over a century in this country has been fundamentally suburban; the city doesn’t suit our consumerist ways as well and conveniently as the suburbs. Fifth Avenue in New York and the Magnificent Mile in Chicago have consumer palaces we love to visit, but most of us can’t afford to buy much in these places. Our real consumer paradise is in the suburban malls and big box stores where we can find an abundance of treasures we can actually afford, and where we can drive right up and walk right in to buy what our heart desires. We can’t afford the big city cathedrals of luxury retailing for the elite, but we are blessed with the affordable and accessible big box suburban churches of consumption for the middle class.

You might think I am out to insult and ridicule the vast majority of Americans who enjoy the delights of accumulating consumer possessions, but this would not be too smart since most of fall into this well-populated group. Instead I will begin by reinforcing the significance and importance of the suburban consumption machine and those who drive it. By-and-large, despite what many academics say, suburban dwellers are happy people, and they want to stay that way. They choose the suburbs for good reason; this is where they can most fully realize their material dreams. Most importantly, these are the people that keep the economy humming, and when they face unemployment, declining housing values, and foreclosures, the economy as a whole suffers. Lets take a quick look at what survey researchers have found out about materialism and reported life satisfaction.

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Happiness researchers postulated early on that materialists would be less satisfied with their lives because they are caught up on an economic treadmill that requires more time earning and buying in order to sustain the delights of a life devoted to consumption. The drop in life satisfaction would come about because of less time devoted to sources of a deeper happiness that comes from interacting with family and friends or from involvement in community activities, such as amateur sports, charitable causes, politics, or church; putting energy into some activity so engaging as to cause one to lose all sense of self-consciousness; or accomplishing some purpose that expresses one’s deepest commitment to highly regarded personal values. The losing of self consciousness through intense engagement psychologists refer to as flow, and a wide variety of activities can produce it—pitching in an a highly competitive baseball game, writing important software code, working on a painting of a desert landscape at sunset, pursuing a deer with a bow and arrow, or climbing San Luis Peak in Colorado. The same is true of accomplishing a valued purpose such as a finishing a book about how to bring climate change to a halt, successfully helping elect a candidate for political office who will support cap and trade, completing a lay sermon about belief in God before a Unitarian church congregation, or actually reaching the top of a fourteen thousand foot Colorado mountain.

Happiness researchers have discovered through surveys that materialists do experience less life satisfaction, primarily because they spend less time with their families and more on economic pursuits. But recent findings paint a more nuanced picture of the relationship between materialism and happiness. In college, the more materialistic students tend to be more outgoing and popular, less accomplished academically, and more likely to take up majors with the best income earning prospects, such as business and engineering, than their less materialistic counterparts. After college, many but not all materialistically oriented graduates achieve financial success. Those that do turn out to be just as satisfied with their lives as their economic peers who care less about making money, but those who aspire to financial accomplishment and fail to achieve it experience a small but statistically significantly lower level of life satisfaction than their peers, again because of less time spent with family. Actual economic success in effect compensates for loss of satisfaction from devotion to an economic treadmill, but if you jump on the treadmill and fail to advance, your happiness suffers. On the whole, materialistic suburbanites who achieve economic success appear to be as happy as anyone else, and those who aren’t suffer for it, but not by much.

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An entertaining expert on explaining how we extract meaning from the life of a materialist is James Twitchell. Consider the quote that begins the final chapter of his book, Lead Us Into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism. Here it is:

Sell them their dreams. Sell them what they longed for and hoped for and almost despaired of having. Sell them hats by splashing sunlight across them. Sell them dreams—dreams of country clubs and proms and visions of what might happen if only. After all, people don’t buy things to have things. They buy things to work for them. They buy hope—hope of what your merchandise will do for them. Sell them this hope and you won’t have to worry about selling them goods.

These are the words of Helen Landon Cass, a female radio announcer, spoken before a convention of salesman in 1923. Is American materialism indeed the answer to the quest for meaning in life? Cass seems to think so and so does Twitchell. Anyone concerned with economics and the pursuit of meaning can’t ignore what Cass and Twitchell have to say given the extraordinary role of consumer desire in our global economic reality today. How could acquiring possessions be an act of self-creation that defines what we care about in the world? What exactly is the power of stuff? Let’s see what Mr. Twitchell has to tell us about consumer desire and meaning. But first, my personal story of seeking meaning through consumption.

I love to spend a few weeks each winter hiking and backpacking in the Sonoran and Mohave Deserts and a month or so in the summer doing the same in the high-mountain Colorado Rockies. I spend a lot of time dreaming about this when I am not actually doing it. I see myself as a botanizer and photographer of wildflowers and landscapes in deserts and high mountain meadows of stunning natural beauty. To do this I need equipment and I need to get there. Navigating the desert or getting up rough mountain roads to trailheads is eased with a four wheel drive vehicle, and now that I am officially old, what could be better than a Toyota RAV4. This I have come to describe as my mountain camping car, partly to assuage my guilt over owning a vehicle that gets only pretty good mileage. You might think that I bought this car to project a certain public image, but I have since determined I did it as a matter of self-definition. Driving it around makes me feel like the hiker and backpacker I am any time of year. A part of my self-creation is what I drive in my own eyes, not so much the eyes of others. I have since discovered that drivers of this particular model use it more for going to the mall judging from their body shapes than driving up mountains to trailheads. Owning a RAV4 for me symbolizes my freedom to explore and have adventures, something that I doubt others perceive. There is lots of other little self-expressive things I buy that has little to do with my public image. I love the small, lightweight stuff that eases the task of backpacking like little stoves, little tents, lightweight sleeping bags, and so on. This is the REI-based (the premier outdoor store and cooperative) consumerism that helps to define who I am. I have just recently, for example, discovered moisture-wicking t-shirts which I just love. For a while, I put my consumer effort into having car camping comfort goods such as a larger tent, chairs, and a screened porch around the picnic table, all of which I have come to enjoy in my old age. I have even looked at some of the smaller travel trailers, but like Diderot’s robe buying one would lead to still other needs, like a bigger, more powerful car.

Recently, I have experienced a modest transformation in my attitude toward all this. I still absolutely love the idea of high mountain exploration even though I am slowing down in my dotage, but I now see car ownership as a pain and driving on four wheel drive roads as creating more anxiety than pleasure. My RAV4 has been sold to my son, a big guy that has to squeeze to get into smaller vehicles and at 26 has yet to own a car (he needs it more than I), and my wife and I will get along on just one car, a well-worn Toyota Corolla. To get to the mountains I will rent something, and I am scaling my car camping back to mostly backpacking sized equipment that will fit on a plane. I would like to get a new camera though with a larger image sensor and a good macro lens for wildflower photography. There is always something more to buy. In any case, self-creation and the search for meaning is a dynamic process, and the REIs of the world do a great job selling me objects of my dreams.

Academics jump on commercial consumerism as a mindless popular caving into Madison Avenue psychological manipulation motivated by a corporate conspiracy to maximize business profits. A mass production economy, capable of creating through the magic of advanced technology a cornucopia of material goods, requires for survival a mass consumption economy able to absorb all that is produced. Inadequate demand would doom such an economy to stagnation and depression. To prevent this, goods must be more than just goods to stimulate people to consume beyond basic need. To transform the ordinary into objects of desire, the practice of marketing adds meaning, through advertising, packaging, branding, and fashion, to products that inherently lack it. When we buy goods, we gain not just something that is materially functional, but something that gives spark and significance to our lives. “And what could ever be wrong with that?”, Twitchell rhetorically asks of us. What exactly is the problem with creating self-identity and expressing what’s especially important to us through the brands of goods we voluntarily choose to possess? Isn’t true democracy the right to choose whatever we want to consume absent substantial harm to others?

In order for goods to express something beyond their physical being, they must possess an identifiable brand to which a meaning can be attached. An ad at the bottom of the New York Times business page caught my eye recently (April 13, 2011) as expressing visually and through brief text a number of ideas about a particular brand. Pictured in the ad is Breitling’s Superocean watch at $3,335 along with a picture of a diver poking his shaved head in swimming goggles above water with the nearby text “Herbert Nitsch, Airline Pilot, Deepsea Diver, Extreme Record Breaker.” The diver and the watch standout in stark contrast against a dramatic black background. The implication to me is that people who are athletic, accomplished, powerful, heroic, affluent, and discerning in their tastes own such luxuries as Superocean watches. Advertisements cannot be overly complicated or they fail in their task to attract viewers and potential customers. Very quickly we learn in this ad that someone with heroic qualities endorses the product. If we aspire to the values and virtues expressed in the ad, then we might well give serious consideration to purchasing the watch depicted, if we can afford it. If we acquire the watch, then we in effect endorse what it symbolizes as expressed in the ad, not only for our own sake, but for the sake of admiring others who know about Breitling which supplies “instruments for professionals,” as the ad tells us. A life of meaning for most of us amounts to choosing our heroes, and advertising endorsements facilitate this task.

As Twitchell argues, “marketing adds a meaning to goods that they intrinsically lack.” Look at any advertisement, and I am sure you can discern the intended message conveyed about virtues of the brand and the people who consume it. Advertising and branding together take over from religion much of the means for satisfying our desires. Prayer to gods as the path to getting what we want out of life gets displaced in the world of commerce by the magical power of goods. Nothing is more magical to me than my Ipod Touch which connects me to the world, whenever wifi is in range, and allows me to socially connect with everyone I know with a touch of the screen. It also permits me to record my thoughts and ideas when I am relaxing in a Rocky Mountain meadow campsite far from civilization, and even read a book, as long as my battery lasts. I can imagine how much more magical an Ipad2 would feel. Its not just advertising in a world of high technology that gives a product meaning, but the design details as well. We want an Ipad2 not just because of its attractive ads, but to experience all the wonderful things it can do for us. Just like prayer, commerce will get you to heaven, only it will be a heaven on earth.

One might think that a mass production economy and its capacity to produce cheaply huge numbers of identical goods would lead to us all consuming the same things and in the process creating highly similar personal identities. Through the wonders of competition in advertising, branding, product design, packaging, and fashion, diversity prevails in the consumer world. Go to any mall, or cruise the internet, and you will discover a never-ending cornucopia of goods. We all have plenty to choose from in creating our own special form of life. Branding seems to refute the notion of consumer individuality since many of us select the same identical product. If enough of us didn’t for a given brand, it wouldn’t survive. Consuming a particular brand isn’t a creative act so much as is selecting a combination of brands to consume. Through choosing an ever-changing combination of brands we continuously seek identity and self-creative meaning. We brand ourselves and construct a coherent self-image by consuming a constellation of products. Life must cohere as Diderot found out in the purchase of his new robe. For those of you who don’t know the story, Diderot lived a messy life including the wearing of a robe that was little more than a rag, which he decided was just too much. He thus acquired a rather plush new one that made the rest of his surroundings look even more tawdry. Soon he bought entirely new furnishings to match his new robe. In the consumer world, buying one thing inevitably leads to another. Diderot in modern terminology branded himself by creating a coherent fashion. How do we today learn about this process? Twitchell tells us it’s TV that does the job, but I suspect that currently its more than that, given the rising use of the the Internet, especially by the young.

In the end, what different types of branded products do for us is what matters. Some of what products achieve is magical, yet mundanely functional. Advil gets rid of our aches and pains, Tide gets our cloths clean, Cheerios keep our heart in shape, and Coke tastes good. We feel more sensual with exotic perfume or aftershave on, and as a result we probably behave more sensually and increase our attractiveness to others. An expensive watch communicates our wealth and power in society. Fancy cars do the same while also giving us an environment of comfort and luxury and a powerful machine that can go from 0 to 60 in nothing flat. Both watches and cars rise to status of a work of art, as can a tastefully appointed living room, or a diamond bracelet. A Green Bay Packer sweatshirt in Wisconsin expresses an affiliation that connects one socially to numerous others. A Northface jacket symbolizes the outdoor activity the wearer presumably undertakes. Goods are, and always have been, signals and signs to others as well as ourselves about who we are, what we believe, and what brings meaning in our lives. Above all, goods communicate. So how does this all related to how we choose to arrange ourselves in space?

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At the mid-Twentieth Century, middle-class Americans everywhere turned their backs on the old, established central cities as places to live, and they did this for good reasons. Streets were traffic-clogged, city governments were often corrupt, crime was fearsome, the quality of schools was in decline, the air was often polluted, the streets were noisy, housing was densely packed and overcrowded, and low-income immigrants of a different race were arriving daily. By contrast the suburbs looked like a dream—open green spaces, new, detached single family houses that one could own, local control of government, social and racial homogeneity, and the ability to commute to work in the privacy of one’s car. What could be better? Before the war, cities retained the hub-and-spoke shape and relatively high density given them by the electric trolley. People either walked to work or they rode the trolley, and many lived compactly in apartments or other kinds of multifamily housing. Outward spreading of the relatively well off to new “streetcar suburbs” for single-family housing occurred in all large cities, but population densities stayed relatively high. The economic and cultural heart and soul of the city remained at its center, but all this was about to change.

Americans could have followed the prewar approach of basing the shape of urban space on public mass transit and compact housing, but they chose a distinctly different path—the creation of an urban transportation system and access to suburban housing rooted in a love affair with the automobile. A majority of urban Americans now live in suburbs instead of central cities and reside in locally governed, low-density municipalities and commute from detached single family homes to low rise business and commercial buildings surrounded by convenient parking. In the process, most Americans now avoid ever setting foot in a high-density central city. Not only did people move to the suburbs, but along with them so have businesses. The multistory central city factory located on a rail line or near a dock found itself replaced by a low-rise suburban plant with its truck bays and close access to freeways. Densely packed older department stores and high-rise offices in the central city business district have been out-competed by low-rise suburban shopping malls and office parks with their ample parking and close proximity to housing developments. Only in the suburbs could our new postwar consumer dream of possessing spacious, well appointed single-family dwellings and sleek, powerful motor vehicles be easily satisfied. Nothing is more important in symbolizing our material accomplishments than our homes and our cars. We fill our living spaces with those consumer items that define who we are, and choose motor vehicles that reflect our deepest values in life. In the U.S., what matters most is where one lives and what one drives. Governments at all levels supported and fostered this dream with home loans guaranteed against default, tax deductions for mortgage interest payments, and massive systems of freeways and highways that eased the task of moving around the suburban landscape.

For several decades following World War II, suburban expansion and the industries it fueled pumped up consumer and investment spending and assured national economic prosperity. In the U.S., the passion for financial accomplishment and material goods has taken a distinctly and even radically suburban form. In our present economic crisis, the suburban dream faces serious challenges in the current middle class experience of rising housing foreclosures, high unemployment rates, and above normal prices at the gas pump. Our economy seriously needs a new engine of growth. The question we now want to address is whether a shift in attitudes and values is in the cards that will in itself push us toward an economy rooted in a more compact and environmentally friendly form of living.

STAY TUNED FOR POST-MATERIALISM.

A Philosophy for Compact Living—Post-materialist Meaning

2011-11-09T12:51:00.000-08:00

Not all of us follow strictly materialist dreams. Some of us look outside our immediate selves and beyond our material interests to find sources of meaning in life. Post-materialist values go beyond one’s private hedonistic desires, such as the enjoying a scoop of French vanilla ice cream, to the pursuit of a something for its own sake beyond the self. As a post-materialist, one would participate in amateur soccer to advance the game itself (as a soccer referee might) or the success of a particular team (as a cooperating team member would), not just for the sake of personal glory or the opportunity to wear fancy soccer clothing. One values soccer for its own sake, not just for the immediate private pleasure the playing of it brings. In a similar vein, one can value for its own sake photographing beautiful landscapes, writing about philosophy, advocating for gun rights, politically pursuing limits on climate change, researching the causes of cancer, fixing a clothes drier, putting a new roof on an older architecturally interesting house, creating a new microbrew, roasting a new variety of coffee, acting in a play by Oscar Wilde, or producing Yellow Perch for Milwaukee fish fries using aquaponic techniques. We might also engage in one of these activities for the money, but we would be doing so primarily because we think the activity and final product have value in their own right. We might think fish ought to be produced organically and without harm to the natural environment but also to provide a decent living to those who do the work of production.

To value post-materially is to possess a deep desire that some activity or being out in the world exists and flourishes into the future. True love is post-material and takes us outside strict self-concern, but pure lust is self-oriented and focuses on satisfying pleasurable desires. There is nothing wrong with lust and pleasure, but we humans also express passionate attachments to activities and beings outside of our personal skins and beyond our material possessions. Only in a state of non-possessive, other-orientation do we forget about our ego and experience the wonders of the world as they stand for themselves. We can experience beings and objects as something over which we desire power and control, or we can experience and appreciate them transcendently as free and independent with a path of their own in time and space and in collective human thought. We can appreciate the continued existence of an ancient and beautiful musical instrument, such as a Stradivarius violin or a Guarneri cello, and the continued presence and performance of beautiful music that can be understood only in the human mind, and we can do this without personal possession or control. The same is the case for colorful wildflower-laden subalpine meadows, world series baseball games, great works of philosophy, well tended gardens, Shakespearian plays, French impressionist paintings, the architectural wonders of a Barcelona, the military precision of troops in formation led by the tunes of a marching band, or jazz performances in the bars of New Orleans.

We have to be especially careful to distinguish the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of meaning. Happiness research does suggest that a life of meaning can add to happiness. Despite the rise of secularism and claims of the “death of God”, many continue to profess belief in God as a central source of meaning, and those who participate in religious activities report in surveys higher levels of life satisfaction than those who don’t. Meaning and purpose in the religious sense indeed adds to happiness, but not all that is meaningful necessary does. Ask any parent about what they would sacrifice for the life and well-being of their children, and many would respond, “anything I have, even my own life.” Clearly, raising children must be a meaningful pursuit. One of the most robust findings from happiness research is that life satisfaction drop significantly during the child-rearing years. We love our children, but they don’t always bring us personal happiness. Here is where meaning in life and happiness part company. Many of us pursuit our passions for their own sake, not necessarily because they make us happy. Happiness can be fortuitous consequence of pursuing a life of meaning, but not a necessary one.

***

To repeat, seeking mean in life boils down to adopting purposes and values about which we care passionately and pursuing them through actions in the world. If we have strong materialist inclinations, then we will find our meaning predominantly in the economic arena where we will pursue wealth and material possessions. If we follow a post-materialist path, our emphasis will be oriented more to the purposes that take us beyond strictly economic pursuits. If you did nothing but look to advertising and the popular media, you might think that post-materialism is a utopian dream, but social scientists over the past several decades have detected a modest but persistent shift favoring values that take us beyond a predominant desire for wealth and consumption.

University of Michigan professor Ronald Inglehart first identified a trend toward post-materialist values in the 1970s, fostering a wave of academic research that continues to this day. He argued that generations raised in a secure and affluent economic environment after World War II exhibit less materialist values than their predecessors. Inglehart offered two interlinked hypotheses to explain this behavior pattern: (i) a ‘‘scarcity hypothesis claiming that “an individual’s priorities reflect one’s socioeconomic environment” and (ii) a socialization hypothesis arguing that “to a large extent, one’s basic values reflect the conditions that prevailed during one’s pre-adult years.” Rather than a predominant concern with physical security and economic success, post-materialists give greater priority to freedom, self-expression, and the quality of life. Older generations possess predominantly materialist values because they grew up in insecure and parsimonious economic conditions, but younger generations, whose formative years took place in a stable and affluent environment, more extensively profess post-materialist values than their older peers. Through long-run generational replacement, post-materialism slowly but inexorably gains sway in the larger society while materialist values recede. Inglehart and others suggest that this trend may well lie behind growth in the environmental movement, weakening loyalties to tradition political parties, and global trends towards democratization. In addition to freedom, self-expression, and the quality of life, recent research finds that the constellation of post-materialist values also includes equality, inner harmony, wisdom, beauty, and social responsibility.

Inglehart claims that the ratio of materialists to post-materialists in affluent western societies declined between 1970 and 1990 from approximately four to one to four to three, and the downward trend continues to the present day. Yet one should avoid getting overly excited by the long-term trend to post-materialism. Survey research also shows that during periods of economic and social upheaval a reversion to materialist values occurs in the population at large. Post-materialist values follow a cyclical pattern that mirrors the ups and downs of the economy with cycles occurring around an upward sloping trend line. Given the depth of our current economic crisis, a rise in materialist values and a decline in post-materialism can be expected, but if history repeats itself, once we dig ourselves out of our present malaise, post-materialism will reassert itself.

More than simple economic security in one’s formative years appear to be behind the historical growth in post-materialism. Growing affluence allows for, and also requires, higher levels of educational attainment in a society, and college attendance has exploded worldwide. Given the common belief that college education is a life forming experience, it is unsurprising that educational attainment helps explain the increasing expression of post-materialist values in surveys. As a college education has become more prevalent among younger generations in the U.S. and elsewhere, so has post-materialism. If college attendance alters social values in a post-materialist direction, and if the incidence of college degrees is less among older than younger generations, than as younger generations replace older, values in the larger population will shift in a post-materialist direction.

The influence of college on social values and political leanings is not an uncontroversial subject. A shift of values in a post-materialist direction among college graduates supports the popular idea that a strong liberal political orientation among university faculty plays a causal role in altering students’ philosophical outlook. Some conservative activists and commentators argue that a predominantly left-leaning university faculty imposes its views on a naive and unsuspecting student body. While student attitudes indeed shift in a liberalizing direction during their college years, research suggests that faculty have little to do with it. Changes in student attitudes are no more pronounced at universities with a more liberal faculty than elsewhere. Instead, the primary influence on students is the values of their peers. At universities where students are more left-leaning, the shift in student attitudes to the left during college is more pronounced. Universities with predominantly liberal students produce liberals, universities with an abundance of conservative students create conservatives, and faculty orientation doesn’t seem to matter in this process. Liberal values win out in this process simply because of the relative dominance of liberal universities. What does make a difference is student interaction with one another. Students come out of a university education not just with changed political attitudes, but also with an increased acceptance of racial and sexual diversity of the sort prevalent among post-materialists. That university students take their own perceptions on the meaning of life in a new direction relative to their parent’s generation thus finds support in research on changes in student attitudes. The influence of events beyond the campus still enter into the student value formation process. Students attending college in times when the public at large is more conservative will cause students to become more conservative themselves, but off-campus influences will be modulated by the on-campus experience. The popular media still plays a role in what students ultimately decide to do with their lives, but so does the university experience. To an increasing degree, younger generations desire to be ‘free spirits’ by moving beyond a strict materialism and seeking a form of life that differs in its content from that reigning in conventional social practice.

***

The notion that education matters in the shaping of one’s deeply held values, is a fundamental premise expressed by pragmatic philosopher Richard Rorty (1931-2007), a true public intellectual with serious insights worthy of consideration by anyone. Hearing what Rorty has to say about seeking meaning in life is worth our time and will add philosophical content to the bones of post-materialist meaning.

In the view of many plant lovers, orchids symbolize the wonders of floral existence. They come in astonishing shapes, attract varied pollinators with their powerful aromas, and possess some of the most beautiful color schemes amongst all the flowering plants. Orchidaceae, the orchid family, contains more than 20,000 species, and has seduced human beings into creating more than 100,000 hybrids. The cleverness of orchids stands out in the myriad forms they take. Orchids use their three petals and three sepals to advance their essential sexual goal—to move pollen from one plant to another. Pollination strategies give orchids the shape they have. One petal of the orchid typically takes on a spoon shape and becomes the landing platform for pollinating insects. Lines in the petals for many species guide insects, much like landing lights, to the nectar reserves deep in the flower. In the process of entering the flower, some of the pollen carried by an insect unavoidably rubs off onto the flower’s pistil (the female sexual organ) and new pollen from its stamens (the male sexual organ) attaches to the insect’s body. Because nectar production is energetically expensive, some orchids have developed tricks to attract pollinators without having to pay a nectar price. Bee orchid coloration, floral structure, and odor mimic the female bee, attracting males who try to copulate with the flower and in the process get deceived into pollen transfers without a reward in return, other than some misspent sexual thrills. The biggest trick of all in the orchid toolkit is getting human beings to spend more than $10 billion annually on orchid breeding and production.

Orchids possess an innate creativity inspiring to human observers, one of whom was Richard Rorty who searched for orchids in the mountains of northwest New Jersey during the summers of his youth. He took great pride in knowing where 17 of 40 species occurring in the mountains grew, their Latin names, and their blooming times. In the winter he would go to the New York City library and read a nineteenth-century volume on the botany of eastern U.S. orchids. Rorty used his youthful love of orchids to illustrate how important our idiosyncratic, self-creative, and seemingly useless passions can be for each of us. According to Rorty, we should have the freedom to pursuit our private obsessions so long as they do no harm to others, although at the same time we should do what we can in the public arena to reduce pain and cruelty in the world. Privately, we pursue self-creation, and, publicly, mutual accommodation, and the public and private needn’t be conflated. An idiosyncratic passion, such as searching for orchids, needn’t have any larger social purpose, although it could. Besides orchid hunting, one might also be moved to organize the protection of habitat for threatened orchid species. While our public obligations shouldn’t be so overpowering as to get in the way of our private passions according to Rorty, this does not rule out the possibility that our private passions will have public benefits as a matter of happenstance. A private search for plants, such as Rorty’s own, could ultimately contribute to what we know about plant species and their geographic distribution. Idiosyncratic private pursuits can hardly be free of some kind of connection to the larger culture and human practice.

Pragmatic philosophers of Rorty’s lineage, reject the big, overarching intellectual schemes that have been the meat-and-potatoes of professional philosophy and suggest pragmatically that beliefs and ideas have value to the degree that they help us more fruitfully get through our daily lives in a positive way. Pragmatists tend to be both pluralists and a democrats. Ideas are to be tested in a public forum of open discourse and debate. The quest should not be for eternal truth, which is probably a waste of time, but for provisional ideas that help advance human well being. Different ways of life are to be respected, and democracy, imperfect as it is, is the best way to reconcile conflicts of interest between competing visions of how to live and to minimize the amount of human cruelty in the world. We human beings possess a morally tribal outlook—we normally extend our ethical reach to only those in our own communities of interaction—but we have the capacity to expand our own tribal boundaries to include others we previously viewed as outsiders. In this way, we gain a commitment to doing what we can to reduce cruelty in the life all human individuals as well as to expand the freedom of all for idiosyncratic pursuits.

For Rorty self-creation is a private matter. This doesn’t mean what one does in life will necessarily be free of cultural or social content. Idiosyncrasy needs the raw materials of cultural and intellectual heritages as points of departure. In Rorty’s eyes, a principle opportunity for self-creation occurs in the institutions of higher education, at least for those with the privileged ability to attend. Secondary education fulfills the task of socializing young people into prevailing cultural traditions, and higher education allows them to individualize and reshape a self-image that is initially imposed on them by their parents and society. Now the options higher education provides for seeking out and shaping a life-vision are imperfect at best because of the institution’s heavy emphasis on vocational training. Rorty’s perspective is simple, although controversial: “Teachers setting their own agendas—putting their individual, lovingly prepared specialities on display in the curricular cafeteria, without regard to any larger end, much less any institutional plan—is what non-vocational higher education is all about.” From such a menu of intellectual offerings and traditions of thought, students can explore their options and cobble together their own unique view of what it means to live a decent and interesting life. Philosophers rarely pursuit empirical evidence for their ideas, but for Rorty’s vision higher education’s role in self-creation, social scientists have done the work for him.

A Philosophy for Compact Living—Post-materialist Meaning and Downtown Living

2011-11-09T12:50:00.000-08:00

If post-materialist meaning motivates growth in high-density, compact urban living, then post-materialists must find special satisfactions in a compact urban environment they don’t get elsewhere. How exactly can spatial compactness facilitate post-materialist pursuits?

Jean-Paul Sartre, French author, playwright, and philosopher loved Paris and spent most of his life there. He lived in modest accommodations as a young man, earned his living teaching, and spent much of his day in cafes, writing, meeting with students, and talking with fellow intellectuals. During World War II, he could be found everyday at the seedy Cafe de Flore next to the stove (only cafes could get coal for heat) near the Sorbonne where he had received his degree in philosophy. He first gained public attention with the publication of his existentialist novel Nausea in the 1930s and soon saw his plays, such as “No Exit” being performed in Paris theaters. Right after the war, Sartre was invited to defend his existentialist philosophy at the Club Maintenant near the Grand Palais where he had to push his way through an overflow crowd to get to the podium. Sartre uses Paris and its cafe life as a backdrop not only for his novels and plays, but even to illustrate philosophical points in his famous Being and Nothingness.

Anyone, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, whose passion in life requires a cheap place to live, inexpensive and efficient public transit, cafes where one can linger all day for the price of a cup of coffee, personal interaction with likeminded others, access to a highly specialized audiences or markets for the fruits of one’s labor, or public institutions such as museums, theaters, stadiums, gymnasiums, universities, or libraries will be attracted to high density urban living. It is in densely packed older cities where such needs are best satisfied. Add to this a decent nightlife, good restaurants, bustling and architecturally interesting neighborhoods, and attractive parks where one can enjoy a bit of nature, and you have most of the ingredients of an “urban” as opposed to a “suburban” dream.

In my own city, two older, densely populated neighborhoods, Riverwest just to the north of downtown and Bayview just to the south, contain a mix of century-old, moderate single family houses, duplexes, and apartments, and numerous aging commercial and industrial buildings. These two neighborhoods have become a haven for students, artists, activists, teachers, and a variety of others whose aspirations or incomes preclude living in the suburbs. Riverwest is the birthplace of Lakefront Brewery, a successful producer of microbrews, and Bayview is home to Sweetwater Organics with its tanks filled with lake perch and tilapia and trays of leafy plants above them in an old factory. Sweetwater and another local Milwaukee business, Growing Power, are innovators in aquaponics and leaders in the pursuit of a commercially feasible urban agriculture. In both neighborhoods, one can find an abundance of great new restaurants, cafes, bars, art galleries, and performance venues. Alterra, a rapidly growing local coffee roaster, recently constructed an architecturally innovative roasting facility and cafe in Riverwest, and is now in the process of constructing a new cafe in Bayview. Bayview is blessed with close access to a beautiful Lake Michigan shoreline park, and Riverwest borders great hiking trails along a revitalized natural Milwaukee River corridor. Riverwest is also less than a mile from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) campus. Owning and using an automobile in these neighborhoods is a pain given the limits on parking, and one can get around easily walking or biking. Milwaukee lacks fancy light rail for public transit, but we do have a fairly functional bus system. Residents of Riverwest don’t really need to bear the expense of car ownership, and they can reside in fairly decent housing more cheaply than in Milwaukee’s suburbs. Crime remains a problem, but it is on the decline in both neighborhoods. If you aspire to the materialist amenities of the suburban dream, Riverwest and Bayview aren’t for you. But if you are looking beyond financial accomplishment and material possessions for meaning in life, either of these neighborhoods might be the place you would want to live.

It isn’t just the offbeat older neighborhoods of Milwaukee that are on the rebound, but more upscale developments in and around downtown as well such as the city’s Third Ward, an old wholesale district with architecturally unique buildings dating from the late Nineteenth Century. Here rising urban popularity has stimulated conversions of older buildings to offices and middle class dwellings with street level retailing alongside new condominium construction. Young affluent professionals and suburban expats drive this trend and they seem more interested in luxury consumption than the residents of Bayview or Riverwest judging from the pricy boutiques and expensive restaurants springing up in the Third Ward and elsewhere downtown. The Third Ward hosts a public market and a complex that is the home of the Skylight Opera and two theater companies that specialize in modern and experimental plays. Today, the revitalized Third Ward attracts both upscale local residents and tourists to its galleries, restaurants, bars, and entertainment venues, but at the sacrifice of some of its original seedy charm.

The essential virtue of compact urban living is close spatial proximity to diverse, interesting urban neighborhoods and a variety of public and private enterprises including theaters, markets, libraries, parks, and institutions of higher learning. The fundamental advantage of expansive suburban living is the comforts of space manifested in big houses and yards, wide roads, and large, auto-accessible shopping malls. The suburbs facilitate material aspirations; diverse densely packed cities foster a broad spectrum of pursuits, some material in orientation, and some not. Great cities of the world contain their temples of consumption filled with material treasures for the wealthy, but they also contain wonderful street markets and numerous small enterprises where the desires of the palate and other simple pleasures find satisfaction at a reasonable price. One needn’t be affluent to enjoy the virtues of high-density urban living and to follow a post-materialist path through life as we will now see. We will also see that a certain kind of post-materialism, one of growing prevalence in central cities, retains a commitment to affluence, but one of a different kind than the suburban variety.

***

Richard Florida, a regional science professor, has gained star standing among urban planners for his book, The Rise of the Creative Class. Florida presents evidence for the emergence of an economically important group of individuals with a new take on life that bears the marks of post-materialist thinking and plays a driving role in a renaissance of downtown urban revitalization. According to Florida, the creative class is compose of professionals, such as scientists, engineers, university professors, poets, novelists, entertainers, designers, architects, and opinion-makers, who conceive new intellectual or artistic forms of economic or public value. Members of the creative class are at once bohemian and conformist. They have an intense desire for personal self-expression, which includes body-piercing jewelry and tattoos, but also possess a powerful work ethic and passion for personal accomplishment, especially in the digital arena doing software development or graphic arts. These are the people one increasingly sees sitting around gourmet coffee shops huddled over their computers or conversing in small groups about a website design, solving a computer software problem, pulling off the conversion of an old commercial building into condominiums, or getting someone elected to political office. They don’t like bureaucratic hierarchy, but believe strongly in being recognized for their work on its creative merits. They especially believe in social diversity of all kinds, and feel comfortable working with others of different races or sexual orientations. Members of the creative class both work and play hard, and express only limited interest in accumulating material possessions and are especially oriented to consuming individual and shared “experiences”, such as adventure travel, road biking or rock climbing or other vigorous activities, offbeat theater performances, cutting edge studio art, or experimental musical events. While Silicon Valley is a suburban bastion for such individuals, they increasingly find urban centers such as downtown San Francisco, Seattle, or Minneapolis to be exciting places to live and work. Creative types, along with the return of aging suburban expats, fuel much of the boom in condominium construction and the conversion of distinctive older commercial buildings to residences in downtowns around the country. Both groups are attracted to the excitement of urban street life in neighborhoods with concentrations of trendy restaurants, theaters, art galleries, espresso shops, brew pubs, bookstores, and entertainment venues. Retailing matters, but its orientation is to specialty foods or wines, boutiques, and outdoor stores that serve the active life of the new inner city residents.

The interest of affluent young professionals in downtown living finds confirmation in a Brookings Institution study of census data by Eugenie Birch, Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania. In a sample of 44 cities, downtown population grew by ten percent in the 1990s and the number of households expanded 13 percent, a substantial recovery after years of decline. In 2000 25 to 34 year olds compose a quarter of downtown populations, up from 13 percent 30 years earlier. The proportion of downtowners having a bachelor’s degree rose to 44 percent, a figure that exceeds both that for cities as a whole and their suburbs. Both homeownership and households with single adults increased significantly in the 1990s as well as the extent of ethnic and racial diversity. With downtowns now containing some of the wealthiest and poorest neighborhoods in cities, the upward trend in the number of affluent residents unfortunately results in an expansion of local economic inequality.

Critics of this new post-industrial economy argue that the return of affluent residents to the inner city has done little to alleviate the poverty that prevails in many of its neighborhoods. The aggregate economy of many central cities continues to sink despite renewed economic energy in their downtowns, and little progress has been made in revitalizing central city school systems. To have a shot in the long-run at entering affluent and creative occupations, inner city residents need education, and to survive and improve their condition in the short-run, they need job training and jobs. The presence of affluent professionals and empty nesters doubtlessly stimulate service sector employment and unskilled work in building rehab and construction, but without bolstering the minimum wage and improving access to decent health care, such jobs will not lead to much real economic progress among the inner city poor. In the longer haul, a strengthening of an affluent middle class who want to raise families in the inner city may create the political conditions necessary for central city educational reform to the benefit of all residents, but there is little evidence of this occurring as yet. A concerted public effort to reduce climatic warming by switching to a clean energy economy and compact forms of living could bring a wide range of employment opportunities to central city residents in such fields as clean energy equipment fabrication, light rail construction, and commercial and residential energy conservation, but movement in this direction has stalled for now.

Critics have also pointed out that Richard Florida’s use of the term “creativity” to define a social class suffers from the problem of being too nebulous to be of much practical use. Given the opportunity, almost anyone can exercise creativity in their work from the espresso barista who finds a unique way to pull a better shot, to an automated machine tool operator who develops a new procedure for improving product quality, to a roofer who figures out a better technique for installing unobtrusive venting pleasing to the eye. It’s not just an elite class of youthful software code writers, web designers, and graphic artists living affluent downtown neighborhoods who are creative. In an expanding hydroponics industry in Milwaukee with an output of organic fish and vegetables, the setting for creativity is greenhouses and old factory buildings, not office buildings and laboratories. The case is similar for custom coffee roasters, brew pubs, and microbreweries springing up in Milwaukee and most other central cities. The rebirth of this kind of manufacturing in the central city seems to be occurring in those industries where the public increasingly demands the kind of quality and uniqueness large corporations are incapable of achieving. Creativity in the world of work need not be confine to a class of youthful professionals who value freedom, diversity, and self-expression. The aspiration and potentiality to be creative in some realm of one’s life is a universal one unrestricted by occupation.

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Not all the creative occupations referred to by Florida in his writing enjoy the affluence of the creative class as a whole. True creativity doesn’t necessarily bring wealth as the artists of the world have repeatedly discovered throughout history. Yet it is this group that concentrates most heavily among all occupations in the central city and serves as a driving force for neighborhood renewal. The popular image of starving artists or aspiring actors as living in garrets and waiting tables for their living contains truthful elements. Artists, conceived broadly to include actors and directors, announcers, architects, drama and music teachers, authors, dancers, designers, musicians and composers, painters, sculptors, craft artists and printmakers, and photographers, are highly educated but poorly paid in comparison to other professionals. Artists often hold multiple jobs in a given year, work outside their chosen occupation to make ends meet, face frequent periods of unemployment, and contend with an income distribution highly skewed towards the relatively few who experience substantial success. Economic success as a artist is a ‘winner take all’ gamble that very few win. Nonetheless, the number of artists has has grown more than twice as fast as the labor force in recent decades, reflecting an expansion in public demand for the products and experiences artists have to offer as a well as a continued willingness of many artists to endure a lower income for the intrinsic rewards of creative work.

Given their economic vulnerability, artists normally choose to locate in inner city neighborhoods with inexpensive rents. For those who require studios or places to rehearse, declining, seedy commercial or industrial areas often provide affordable space in which to both work and live. Artists concentrate in central cities to a greater degree than most other occupations and tend to cluster together in particular neighborhoods that best suit their needs for space. Clustering enables interactions from which spring ideas and information on economic opportunities and concentration of supporting art galleries and display spaces or performance venues. Over the last forty years, the Wicker Park neighborhood has evolved into what sociologist Richard Lloyd calls a “neo-bohemia” that originated in artistic clustering. The neighborhood initially offered an abundance of old, unoccupied commercial space and working class bars that became outlets for performers as well as watering holes for the invading ‘bohemians’. By the late 1990s the neighborhood saw a growth of trendy restaurants, bars, entertainment venues, coffee shops, and art galleries popular with Chicago’s growing class of young professionals. Along with this came a flood of building rehabs and condo construction pushing property values dramatically upward driving many of the artists that set off the whole process to cheaper rents on the neighborhood’s periphery.

For Wicker Park, artistic vitality turned out to be self-destructive as it has for other so called bohemian communities such as Paris’ Montmartre or Left Bank or San Francisco’s North Beach. Post-materialist young professionals attracted to downtown living retain the consumerist ways of their affluent parents, but turn more to spending their dollars on shared experiences as opposed to the accumulation of material possessions and they love doing so in neo-bohemian bastions of creativity. They choose to live at high densities in condos and apartments for the privilege of participating in the the varieties of human experience that requires proximity—music and entertainment, art galleries and public art, museums and the performance arts, and a lusty bar scene. Life on the streets and in the parks of a big city in itself constitutes a human drama that the suburbs are challenged to match. Part of the charm of neighborhoods like Wicker Park is their marginality and the oddballs and characters they attract. Suburbs are safe and convenient while the central city is dangerous but exciting and stimulating. The problem with the invasion of affluence into neighborhoods like Wicker Park is the pushing out of those people who create the bohemian ambience in the first place.

While a neighborhood arts scene may be attractive to affluent consumers, gentrification need not be the inevitable result. Riverwest, a neighborhood with 11,500 residents just to the north of the Milwaukee’s downtown I described above, has evolved recently into a local arts and entertainment center with a growing collection of interesting bars and restaurants. The area was originally settled by working class immigrant Polish families more than a century ago who built modest duplexes and small simple frame houses. The neighborhood today also contains old store fronts and a number of aging factory buildings. Artists usually rent, but one of the big attractions of Riverwest is the feasibility of purchasing a modest house or storefront that can serve as both a studio and a place to live. The humble character of the housing stock gives it an immunity from gentrification and keeps the neighborhood affordable and attractive not just to artists, but to a racially and ethically diverse collection of residents as well as students from nearby UWM. For the past twenty-seven years, the Riverwest Artists Association has sponsored ArtWalk, a walking tour displaying the creations of a hundred plus local artists at studios, galleries, and homes throughout the neighborhood, demonstrating the scale and endurance of the local arts community. If anyone expresses post-materialist values, it is artists, and alongside the arts community in Riverwest exist a number of activists groups with goals beyond material accomplishment, including the Riverwest Neighborhood Association, Peace Action Center, Riverwest Rainbow Alliance (an organization of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender residents), and Children’s Outing Association. While the occupants of expensive condos along the Milwaukee River on the southern edge of Riverwest may well be seeking post-materialist consumer experiences in the central city, the residents of Riverwest seem to hue even more closely to a post-materialist philosophy in their economic sacrifices for the sake of creative expression. Nonetheless, there is a certain economic symmetry in Riverwest’s durability as an arts community and the springing up of affluent condo development nearby. Riverwest has artistic experiences and objects to sell, and the young professionals and suburban expats moving into nearby condos have the money to buy.

***

The return of an affluent middle class to the central city in places like Chicago’s Wicker Park and Milwaukee’s Third Ward reflects a growing post-materialist interest in experiences that require a ‘shared consumption’. When we share we get pulled outside of self-concern. This is especially the case with such events as musical performances, theatrical presentations, visual art displays, sporting events, and political pep rallies. In such instances, being a part of an audience or participatory group is an integral part of the experience. The same is true more casually in the enjoyment of a neighborhood’s street or cafe life, or on a Sunday stroll through a park or along an urban lakeshore. In all such instances possession by the consumer is immaterial to the experience. Artists in central cities survive by virtue of their ability to serve this post-materialist shift in the nature of middle class consumption. Artists survive by producing opportunities for experience. Post-materialist experience requires proximity, and compact living greases the skids of spatial proximity and promotes the sharing of experiences in both public and private spaces. It is in urban spaces that we get the we get our fullest exposure to the diversity of the human experience, and where we have the greatest opportunity to submerge our personal egos in the content and flow of this larger reality. This is not to say that the post-materialism lacks its dangers. The urban entertainment industry is driven in partly by a dark alcohol and drug fueled desire for ecstatic group experiences and sexual unions that can have exploitative and addictive outcomes, especially for those doing the work of serving. Aspiring artists pushed into part-time service work out of economic necessity often have to put up with obnoxious and even violent behavior for the sake of getting tips, and can get stuck in doing work for much of their lives they didn’t plan on. The post-materialist values of the young urban professional remain a mixture of hedonistic desire for urban entertainment and a self-transcendent interest in creativity and human diversity. Underlying this nonetheless lies a real passion for the products of human creativity. A Bohemia without creativity along with its lusty and tragic qualities wouldn’t be much of a Bohemia. Artistic creativity ultimately produces objects and experiences that give insight into existential meaning. The post-materialism of young professionals may lack seriousness and for many may only be vicarious, but it is a movement in a direction beneficial to the idea of living more compactly in the service of human creativity.

For nearly a century now our human spatial dream has been materialist, expansive, and suburban, but the winds of our dreams may now be subtly shifting toward post-materialism and high density urban compactness. If this is the case, a virtuous result is increasing energy efficiency and a reduction in the pressure on global climate change.

A Philosophy for Compact Living: Frederich Nietzsche, Free Spirits, and Post-materialists

2011-11-08T08:49:00.000-08:00

The Greeks celebrated two great themes in life: the beauty, power, and creativity of the human individual and the inevitability of deep and personal tragedy in the course of historical and personal events. The first took form in the plastic arts, in statues and temples, and the second in the Greek theater, in the performance of plays written in competitions to win the hearts of Greek audiences. Theater for the Greeks was a public event where one could submerge the pains of individual life into that of the whole and gain cathartic release and a sense of identity with a larger being. In public celebration, one finds that one is not alone in facing the sufferings and cruelties of life and death.

Dionysus, who the Greek spring theater festival commemorated, was himself a contradiction, a purveyor of the joys and ecstasies of life, but also one who condoned the chase of living beings and their dismemberment by his lovely maenads who otherwise danced and flitted through the woods in ecstatic revery. Dionysus is the god of wine and the Greeks are nothing else if not realistic in the creation of their gods. Wine brings forth pleasure but also the dark ravings and destructiveness of dangerous drunks. Tragedy was a fitting theme for celebrating the emergence of new branches on the grapevine and the mixed blessing of the coming new wines. Wine and celebration dulls life’s rough edges but also can destroy its tranquility and beauty.

These ideas Frederich Nietzsche, a cranky but brilliant German philosopher who lived and wrote in the last half of the Nineteenth Century, describes brilliantly in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy. On the topic of pain and suffering, from experience he knew of what he spoke. Illnesses, including migraines, deteriorating vision, and digestion problems caused him to retire early from his professorship and kept him from studying and writing more than a few hours a day. He also sadly suffered from depression and mental disorders that eventually drove him insane.

Western thinking is wrongly dominated in Nietzsche’s eyes by Socratic rational elements that exclude our darker non-rational side that take form in a fear of death, a deep passion for life’s pleasures, and the submergence individuality within a larger being. The striving for continued existence, the exercise of the animal instincts, the lust for sexual union, and the mystery of death all possess an amazing power over our emotional lives. Just like the Greek God Dionysus, we want to immerse our selves in these life forces, forget our individuality, and become one with the ecstasies of earthly being. Unfortunately, such passions can get out of control and descend into Dionysian barbarisms of rape, pillage, and murder that we see all to often in the daily news.

The opposing and equally powerful tendency, to rationalize existence and explain it in logical terms, is embodied in Apollo, the Greek god of light, dreams, and plastic energy whose essence is captured by artists in sculpted, idealistic images that exhibit order, tranquility, and control. Apollo symbolizes regulated beauty and contentment, which Nietzsche sees as an illusion given the reality of tragic suffering and death, but an illusion that we all deeply desire. Otherwise, life’s intrinsic pain would be too hard to bear. We dream of a predictable and beautiful world, and Apollo symbolizes that dream. Life for the Greek philosopher Socrates is Apollonian in its quest for truth through logical thought and orderly being. Wrong actions are the result of imperfect knowledge and good actions emerge from clear thinking; knowledge is virtue and the virtuous are happy.

Nietzsche sees in the Greek tragedy a publicly shared reconciliation with life’s realities. Rather than narcissistically focusing on our individual plight, we find collective dignity and joy in stories about life’s deep sadnesses. We long for connection with the primitive, the natural, and the wild, an ecstatic union with a worldly whole where we can forget about our individual troubles. We would like to believe that we can control and shape the world and that doing so serves the end of our happiness. The reality is that we are limited beings with a modest capacity to determine our own destiny. Hard as it may be, we need to accept the cruelties of human existence and the limitations of our individual lives and find solace in nature's beauty and immerse ourselves in its overpowering wonder. This is where joy and contentment come in—connection to the world and acceptance of our historical fate. Despite the horrors of daily life, we have little choice but to plunge ahead and do something that occupies our talents and strengths. The collective experience of theatrical tragedy driven by the haunting music of the chorus helped the Greeks do just that. This is the ecstatic Dionysian dance converted to a theatrical form. Music for Nietzsche emotionally binds us to the group and lets us forget about our individual vulnerability and mortality. Psychologically it can put us in a trance and send us off to the heavens. For me personally, chamber music does this, but in our own times, the best example for most may be a rock concert, judging from audience behaviors at such events. Any public gathering rooted in a shared experience give us an uplifting sense of connection to the human totality—baseball games, political rallies, plays (including Greek tragedies), and musical performances. We come away with a cleansing feeling that life is good and worth living (unless maybe our team loses). Sporting events and political rallies satisfy our instincts to warrior competitiveness, and the performance arts our quest for beauty and order as well inoculation from life’s pains and horrors. Public rituals and their underlying shared values create feelings of affinity and commitment within a society. After such events, one can return to daily life with a renewed energy to take on not only ordinary tasks but Apollonian projects that give life beauty and rationality. We indeed need a little ‘Greek cheerfulness,’ something that can give us comfort and joy in our personal lives to accompany our collective bond to the larger community and our reconciliation with our suffering and mortality. These are messages of The Birth of Tragedy.

Nietzsche’s thinking takes an individualistic turn with the disappearance of Dionysian elements central to the The Birth of Tragedy and its replacement with a more positivist and empirically oriented philosophy in such works as Human, All-To-Human and The Gay Science. Understanding now comes for Nietzsche with close attention to the reality around us and a rigorous critical assessment of our social constructs and beliefs. Quasi-religious, oceanic, or mystical feelings rooted in public spectacles or religious or artistic experiences are fine, but they tell us nothing special about reality, other than an inclination to such feelings. The Dionysian need for collective connection to salve our fears of suffering and death shrinks in importance and attention to individual self-creation and accomplishment expands in these later writings. Our wilder urges for sensual experiences and holistic merging are to be redirected and put to good use.

Nietzsche refers to this task as self-overcoming, a sublimating and steering of one’s emotional urges towards artistic and intellectual productivity. Out of this exercise in self-control arises the values that we should live by—courage, self-discipline, hardness, and intellectual integrity. One’s personal life is like a work of art and should be consciously molded and shaped accordingly. We have to accept the fundamentals of who we are—our inner drives, our skills and talents, and our limitations—but we then must have the courage and will to consciously shape what we do in life. We shouldn’t simply accept whatever society lays out for us as an income earner or consumer. If you don’t like crunching numbers, avoid becoming an accountant. If you find the suburbs boring, take a chance and move to a more exciting but gritty central city. All this requires individual self-assertion and discipline, the opposite of succumbing to safe comforts and group conformity. Focus on that one striving most stimulating to your passion and concern, and organize your life around it. This is the essence of Nietzsche’s advice, not too different what one would find in the popular psychology section of a bookstore today.

Self-creation for Nietzsche is only for those with a capacity to become ‘free spirits.’ Nietzsche writes not for the popular audience, but for a select group of elite thinkers willing to go against the social grain in their advocacy for new and unpopular ideas. ‘Free spirits’ lead the charge in formulating unpopular but necessary alternatives to ossified and failed social traditions and institutions.

Nietzsche himself fills the bill as a ‘free spirit’ in his unrelenting and lifelong attack on Christianity. The “death of God” claim, for which he is famous, refers uniquely to a Christian God and a doctrine that devalues actual life in favor of a hypothetical and unproven afterlife. Faith in God and charity towards others in this life will be eternally rewarded in the next. One gives to a homeless beggar or the Salvation Army bell ringer at Christmas not out of fellow feeling, but from a fear of Godly retribution for being uncharitable, a sense of shame for being ungenerous, or the psychic satisfaction from feelings of economic superiority over others. The homeless beggar in turn experiences the indignity of having to rely on the charity of others. Nietzsche infers that charity of any kind, Christian or otherwise, blunts the desire for self-reliance, independence, and accomplishment, and insidiously debilitates cultural motivations for progress and achievement. Focusing on the next life supports the institutions of Christianity at the ultimate cost of weakening the cultural fabric of this life.

Although Nietzsche devoted much of his writing to attacking modern Christianity, he recognized the need for tradition as a social glue essential for group survival in a world of conflict and competition. Medieval Christianity, with the mystery of its ritual and the power of its priesthood to offer forgiveness of sins and entry into heaven, kept the peasantry under control and working hard to supply basic economic sustenance to the church and its aristocratic allies. Christian charity not only kept the church afloat, but also provided a safety net to the peasantry in hard times. For the majority of a society’s population, what Nietzsche dismissively calls the herd, obedience to the Christian tradition was essential for basic order in Medieval times, but in a changing world, such traditions lose their effectiveness and new values are required to prevent social and economic decline. In a modern rationalistic capitalist society, economic discipline depends less on religious and more on economic reward. Belief in God and an afterlife loses its motivational functionality in today’s consumer economy where more immediate benefits drive economic behavior.

In his explanation of how societies change and evolve, Nietzsche is a Darwinian. For survival, communities rely on a binding faith embodied in customs and traditions that create the order and civility essential for social survival. As a matter of habit individuals in society obey unwritten rules that limit harm to others in daily interaction and commit everyone to the defense of the community against outside oppression. We must not only be willing to hold doors for others and refrain from stealing wallets sticking out of back pockets, but to take up arms against enemies if necessary. From time to time, the basic tenants of the underlying binding faith lose their effectiveness and need to be reformed. Such circumstances require the death of old traditions and the birth of new.

For Nietzsche, it is the ‘free spirits’, those iconoclasts in society who look on existing practices with contempt and seek out those new schemes of value necessary for continued social progress. The values postulated in his day, especially by the church, were repulsive to Nietzsche, who saw in them a means to dominate and control society. The concept of the ‘death of God’ postulated by Nietzsche meant the rejection of an existing religious dogma that in its commitment to faith and charity sapped the worldly passion for creativity.

Nietzsche is famous for a second theme as well, ‘the will to power.’ Will to power has received two interpretations, one benign and one more insidious. At one level will to power is self-overcoming, the guiding and directing of basic passions to productive ends. Self-creation of this kind requires a degree of will to power, but Nietzsche goes further and proclaims that there is within our earthly existence “will to power, and nothing besides.” In this formulation, all of life becomes an exercise in self-expansion, power, and domination for individuals and societies alike. In his most foreboding work, Beyond Good and Evil, this idea takes on a special prominence. In watching daily television newscasts on worldly events, one can easily become convinced that Nietzsche might be right.

For Nietzsche, a focus on will to power in some of his writings is more an experiment than an overarching commitment to a singular vision of human motivation. Throughout his intellectual career Nietzsche tried ideas on for size and discarded those that didn’t wear well. Some he simply put in the closet for later use, but as one Nietzsche scholar convincingly argues, ‘will to power’ is not among them. The rise and fall of Nietzsche’s commitment to will to power is chronicled in a chapter of a must-read book for anyone interested in philosophy, Julian Young’s Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography. Most tellingly, Nietzsche wrote over a thousand pages of notes on will to power but never published his planned crowning achievement on the topic. Nietzsche’s sister Elizabeth published a badly edited version,The Will to Power: Attempt at Revaluation of All Values, for her own sinister ideological purposes after his death. Otherwise, will to power as a singular notion explaining natural and historical evolution takes up very few of Nietzsche’s published pages. That there is ‘will to power and nothing else’ seems to be one of the ideas he tried on for size but ultimately rejected. Philosophers who achieve intellectual fame, such as Plato and Kant, are ‘systematizers’ who create frameworks that claim to explain existence in comprehensive terms. Although he clamored for the recognition accorded ‘systematizers’, Nietzsche’s deep intellectual integrity caused him to reject such an approach. As he claims in Twilight of the Idols, “The will to systems is a lack par excellence: I distrust all systematizers and avoid them.” The complexity and richness of the observed world in Nietzsche’s view precludes simplistic explanations and moves him to give up on will to power as an overarching idea that tells us how things hang together. In one of his final published works, Twilight of the Idols, he expresses a renewed commitment to the intellectual dualism of the Dionysian urge for connection and the Apollonian impulse for individual creativity. Will to power remains a central force behind personal self-overcoming and the impulse to free artistic and intellectual expression, but never takes hold as a final explanation of all organic and inorganic phenomena in the observed world. The path of human flourishing for Nietzsche is ultimately to be defined by a community’s own invented virtues from which the brutal exercise of unbridled power ought to be excluded.

How do you know when life has achieved its self-creative purpose? Nietzsche offers us a mental exercise to establish just this. Suppose you are told that you will experience your life in its every detail repeatedly in a never ending cycle. Would you view this news with absolute horror or overpowering joy? This is an expression of Nietzsche’s doctrine of the ‘eternal return of the same.’ If this question evokes positive feeling, then you must be close to your self-creative goal. Most of us do things we seriously regret, but if we can look back on our life as a whole and judge it positively, we have done the best we can. Nietzsche’s eternal return is a tough taskmaster most of us can never perfectly satisfy. Nonetheless, Zarathustra in Nietzsche’s crowning literary work experiences spiritual and Dionysian visions of ‘eternal return’ through an ecstatic connection to his free-spirited disciples, as imperfect in practice as they were. Nietzsche here closes his own intellectual circle with a return to the idea of submergence in the whole. In an act of self-overcoming we are to organize our life around a singular mission that links us to the historical fate of the world around us. Our chosen mission, would allow us to will eternal return, not just for ourselves but for all that exists. My reading of this point goes something like this: choose a mission for your life that you believe would be good beyond your own self; organize you life around that mission; while having an ultimate faith that your hopes will be realized, bear no illusions that your personal accomplishments will make much difference, but retain a lifelong commitment to the end you seek. No matter how painful and fearful life is, to it one must always say yes. In Nietzsche’s eyes, this is the essential message of the Greeks who individually and collectively celebrated human perseverance, heroism, and perfection in the face of overwhelming cruelty and tragedy.

***

If Nietzsche lived today, where would he find his ‘free spirits’? Given his passion for the arts, especially for music, he would doubtlessly check out the post-materialists bringing new energy and artistic accomplishment to some of our older central cities. Here he might find fascination with the emergent quest for creative accomplishment in both the arts and digital arenas, growing distaste for conformity to the materialist values, Dionysian desire for unique collective and personal experiences, and growing advocacy for free personal expression. He might find pleasantly surprising a post-materialist combination of stylistic nonconformity and traditional commitment to hard work and merit-based reward, but would not much liked a new tendency to democracy, social diversity, and opportunity for all. Nietzsche, you will recall, believed true creativity to be inevitably confined to an elite and talented few.

While all post-materialists look beyond strictly private concerns, some do so more fully than others. One can be strongly committed to self-creativity and passion-driven experiences without identifying very deeply with such self-transcendent concerns as environmental improvement or greater economic equity. Nietzsche falls in the post-materialist camp, but he wouldn’t have much truck with any modern movements that attract the more activist and democratically oriented post-materialists. As Richard Florida discovered in his focus group conversations, well-paid young professionals for the most part occupy the less self-transcendent end of the post-materialist value spectrum. They hold individuality and personal freedom to be of high importance and reject traditional conformity to group norms in dress and control over their time, but they work hard and give strong support to reward and recognition for creative accomplishment. Their workday might not begin until noon, but they may well work past midnight creating new computer code or designing a new web site. In their off hours, they run, bike, rock climb, take in the latest band or check out the latest offbeat art exhibit. They and their friends come from diverse racial backgrounds, but have creative ambition in common. They possess a sense of special privilege as social innovators who lead economic and cultural arrangements in new and more fruitful directions, a phenomena that Nietzsche would doubtlessly applaud. In this they face the potential for hubris that all meritocratic elites experience throughout history, including the likes of Frederich Nietzsche.

A Philosophy for Compact Living: Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism and Starving Artists

2011-11-07T07:56:00.000-08:00

Not all young professionals or so lucky as those in Richard Florida’s ‘creative class’ focus groups. The creative talent of Wicker Park described in Richard Lloyd’s book, Neo-bohemia, struggle to make a living, unlike their affluent young professional customers who haunt the local galleries, music venues, and nightspots. It is in the local bars and music venues that actual and aspiring artists and musicians work to make ends meet. In this neo-bohemian setting, servers who treat their physical selves as their own vehicle for artistic expression face special challenges in their daily lives. To be hired initially and retained their employment, servers must project a unique persona attractive to their experience-seeking clientele. Bar and restaurant owners compete for customers through the edgy image presented within their establishments. As Lloyd notes, servers have to strike a balance in the hustle for tips between pleasing their customers and fending off unwanted sexual advances. Many servers get caught up in the nightlife culture and end up neglecting their original artistic goals, going out for free drinks on their nights off supplied by their counterparts in other bars instead of devoting their energies to creative work. The kinds of dilemmas faced by these less fortunate members of the ‘creative class‘ closely fit those described by Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist philosophy. For this reason, spending a little time with Sartre should will help us sharpen our thinking on the realities of the newly emergent ‘creative class’ fundamental to the growing interest in compact living.

Sartre sets out his basic philosophical ideas in Being and Nothingness where he begins by describing abstractly what it means to exist in the world. At a given moment we are an “in-itself,” a simple object in like any other. As an in-itself we human beings are existent things, just like rocks, avocados, or snakes. We are admittedly uncommon things with special intellectual powers, but nonetheless things. Unlike non-human things, we have a consciousness with its capacity for self-recognition and reflection. This causes us to possess a “for-itself” which constantly jumps ahead of where we, and what we, are at any given moment. We are always thinking about our next move, what we will be doing in a coming span of time. We feel constantly restless and ready to move forward, to shift into a new and novel state of being. Here arise the notions of negation, “not-being,” and nothingness. We out for-itself seeks to negate our in-itself; our in-itself is not the being that exists outside itself; and the nothingness of not being anything at all looms as a distinct possibility in our future. At any given moment our consciousness being, our “for-itself,” is out ahead of what we are, our “in-itself.” Never happy with our current condition, we keeps pushing toward some desired future state. We don’t have the house we want, haven’t yet traveled to Australia, still haven’t found the love of our life, and don’t fully understand Martin Heidegger’s philosophy much less Jean-Paul Sartre’s. In short, we are never happy with our current state and press for the something different. Our conscious being is always out ahead pushing us in a new direction. Our physical and mental in-itself is never equivalent to our consciously wanted self-image. The in-itself is a thing in a certain physical state; consciousness is self-aware thought; and never the two shall meet. In our consciousness we are never what we are in our existent being. I see myself as a home-owning, widely traveled, well-loved, and philosophically knowledgeable person in my conscious self-image, but at this moment my in-itself fails to measure up. I am on a moving treadmill of not-yet-realized expectations and I can never get off, and at any given time I am stuck with who I am. My “in-itself” is constantly negated by my “for-itself,” and my desired state of being fails to coincide with my existential self.

A basic premise of Sartre’s philosophy is that our existence lacks any intrinsic meaning. We are here in the world for no obvious reason. This fact gives us great freedom, intense anguish, and a huge responsibility. We have no choice but to choose a path through life—we are condemned to be free as Sartre puts it. The life we choose is up to us and we bear the responsibility for how that life turns out. The likelihood of choosing the wrong path through life, our inability to control the future, and our fear that we might lack the courage to exercise our choice responsibly and authentically create in us a deep sense of anguish. Certainty of acting correctly eludes us. We try to avoid this sense of anguish by adopting roles and meanings in life that society coughs up for us. Even then subconscious doubt about what we do remains as a distinct possibility.

Sartre has little use for bourgeois conformity and oppressive conventions, a view he expresses through the principle character, Rouquentin, in his best-selling first novel, Nausea, set in Bouville, a fictional commercial seaport on the French coast. While looking enviously on the fact that the Bouville middle class possesses well defined life projects that supply it with a self-identity and meaning in the form of family, home, and profession, Rouquentin finds the repeated routines he observes in the life of the town as tedious and boring, even repellent. The presence of those nauseating others he observes around him with their socially determined projects nonetheless forces Rouquentin to look honestly at his own life. He finds his own efforts in historical research that he works on daily in the local library to be useless and comes to sees the world around him as absurd and alienating. The problem for him is an absence of meaning in his work and a history of failed relationships with others. Still he rejects the opinions of others, but ends up judging his own life to be an empty failure. Until the very end of the book, he can’t see his way out. His conscious self doesn’t know how to direct his being to meaningful projects. Only in the final pages does he finally decide to move to Paris and write a novel.

Rouquentin avoids succumbing to social convention, but instead struggles with the anguish of choosing how to use his personal freedom. Unlike Rouquentin, the biggest pitfall most of us face in the quest for a life of meaning is the danger of caving into society’s demands for conformity and the “look of the other” that causes us to shrink in shame before social judgments. A lack of self-confidence in our own ability to choose a life-path causes us to look to our fellow human beings for acknowledgement, but we do so with trepidation. Normal human affection—a relaxed and unthreatening felt connection to someone else—gets suppressed by the judgmental “look of the other,” that “evil eye” we project on those who do wrong. In the end we cave into popular conceptions about how we ought to live and behave as our insurance policy against social rejection.

Consider the actions of a typical Parisian waiter as describe by Sartre in Being and Nothingness.

His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patron with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer…All his behavior seems to us a game.

Sartre wrote this to illustrate the notion of “bad faith,” the idea that we play at our role and do so to conform to practices demanded by the public. We get diverted by social requirements into adopting a pattern of life rather than creating one that is uniquely our own. In doing this we mislead ourselves into thinking we act freely, but in reality we succumb to the perceived judgment of others and the shame this brings from our inevitable failure to measure up. In Sartre’s eyes, social life boils down to an exploitive dance in which we fruitlessly try to control each others’ perceptions. In the end, failure dooms such attempts. We can never really know for certain the true feelings of others, and any attempt to impinge on their freedom to think and to judge will be to little avail. Rather than getting on with our own self-chosen projects, in Sartre’s view we waste our energies in the mutual pursuit of strategic and conflicting ends in our personal relationships. Whether he is right, I leave for you to judge. In doing so, other possibilities might arise in your thinking, such as something like the following.

Return for a moment to the café. Waiters follow traditional patterns in their work that comply with public expectations but this does not rule out creative and unique interpretations of what it is to be a waiter. One can imagine a waiter doing his work in a way as to express his own idiosyncratic personality. A tall, elegant waiter of Haitian extraction glides to my table, inquires as to my well being, takes my order and magically appears moments later with my double café and croissant, placing them precisely and gently on the table while commenting on the beauty of the day. The man behaves with pride in his profession, something I can appreciate and enjoy. He later returns to collect my money, making change with dignity and efficiency. The next day I return for a repeat performance. This time a customer, who acts like a regular and probably tips well, sits down in the cafe several minutes after me. The waiter, aware of the circumstances, serves me first despite the obvious impatience of the regular. This is what a good waiter does as a matter of practice, refraining from any strategic judgement about ultimate relative rewards in deciding who to serve first. We don’t see the whole of our Haitian waiter in our brief interactions, but we do see an expression of at least part of his life that we can enjoy and appreciate. Whether given in bad faith or not, our lives in the eyes of others are to a degree an act. The real question is whether we carry it out with sincerity and creativity and whether we possess sufficient freedom to do so.

One could take this alternative interpretation of a waiter’s life too far. No occupation is an entirely a thorn-free bed of roses. Customers can be difficult, muscles will ache after a long day, and repetitious tasks can be tedious. Still, one sees pride in the affectations of at least some waiters who may well perform an act, but with authenticity and concern. Participating creatively in the tradition of a Parisian waiter could be a consciously and freely chosen activity, much like writing Being and Nothingness. The question for us here is whether the freedoms in behavior enjoyed by our Haitian waiter, or for that matter Jean-Paul Sartre, extends to the artists and servers of Wicker Park.

The heyday of arts community predominance in Wicker Park occurred in the 1990s prior to a major influx of young professionals into the area. A few of the bars were emerging as entertainment venues for rock bands who attracted outsiders into the neighborhood, but most of the cafes and watering holes were oriented to a local clientele. By 2000, the neighborhood had become a cultural and entertainment destination with and expanding array of restaurants, bars, galleries, antique stores, and boutiques depending largely on a young professional clientele. At this point developers became active in the area constructing new housing for affluent customers. While rising rents pushed artists to the periphery of the neighborhood, the area retains its bohemian and hip flavor even though the local population mix has shifted decidedly in favor of those who work in Chicago’s downtown business establishment. The artistic talents of local residents has attracted a number of web design firms who require not only digital literacy but also an aesthetic sensibility in their employees.

Wicker Park retains class divide between young professionals and artists that finds its clearest expression in the neighborhood’s bars that rely heavily on an influx of affluent youths seeking a Bacchanalian ecstatic experienced fueled by music, drink, drugs, and a potential for sexual liaison. The primary source of labor for local bars and restaurants is the nearby arts community whose members depend on such work for a living while pursuing entry into their chosen careers. Youth, looks, and a unique, hip fashion sense help immeasurably in getting hired as a server or bar tender in Wicker Park. Unlike the conformity to tradition of Sartre’s Parisian waiter, Wicker Park servers are rewarded for an offbeat and unique style in their appearance which becomes a design element for bars and nightclubs in their competitive efforts to attract customers. Servers in this environment enjoy the opportunity of expressing their own artistic skill by creating themselves as a work of art. The downside in this form of expression is the role it plays in competition for both employment and tips. Female servers must balance success as a server and the extra tips that can come with a sexually provocative look against the problem of unwanted sexual advances from male customers. In short, the capacity for creating a unique style is limited by the expectations of not only bar owners but tip-supplying customers as well. Just as is the case for a Parisian waiter, the work of being a Wicker Park server can be strenuous, repetitive, and at times boring. Servers also have to deal with social pressures from their colleagues to go out drinking in their off hours, taking away time from their artistic pursuits as well as recovery from the physical and mental stresses of the job. Alcohol addiction and a failure to pursuit professional goals can be the end result. As on server expresses it, “If I’m still here in a year, kill me.”

The quest to be an artist is a laudable pursuit in the context of an existentialist philosophy of being. In the activity of art one both finds and creates expressions of meaning. If anyone can overcome the dangers of bad faith and anguish in choosing a path through life, artists have a good chance. As we see for Wicker Park servers, circumstances can conspire against them in obtaining their hearts’ desires. While they may see themselves as uniquely creative individuals, the conditions servers face conspire against them in the pursuit of their chosen purpose. If they don’t exercise ‘bad faith’ by ignoring their true condition and continuing to see themselves as artistic, they will suffer the ‘anguish’ of being unable to achieve their self-chosen purpose.

Whether or not the Wicker Park case constitutes a widespread phenomenon matters. If artists create urban communities to facilitate their purposes that ultimately get destroyed in a gentrification process driven by an influx of post-materialist young professionals, then this new form of compact living will possess a dark and undesirable quality. While many of the well known urban bohemian districts have succumbed to affluence, whether all arts-based neighborhoods suffer the same fate may not be the case. Milwaukee, a seemingly ordinary older industrial city, surprisingly contains a substantial population of artists, many of whom have taken up residence in inner city neighborhoods such as Riverwest and Bayview. As already describe above, Riverwest houses numerous artists, art studios, interesting restaurants and bars, and a variety of entertainment venues, including the Jazz Gallery run by the Riverwest Artists Association. Riverwest serves as a local bastion of activist left-leaning politics that attracts substantial involvement by local artists and adds a stabilizing element to the neighborhood. Despite a solid core of artists living and working in the neighborhood and an expanding nightlife, unlike Wicker Park, Riverwest has avoid an influx of affluent young professionals into the neighborhood and a surge in property values. Artists have been able to solidify their presence by taking up ownership of aging, affordable Polish flats, duplexes, and storefronts that have little middle class appeal but can be rendered into comfortable and pleasing environments in which to live and work. The local nightlife lacks the supercharged energy of Wicker Park, but provides a more neighborhood oriented and less exploitive working environment for servers and bartenders.

In those first tier artistic centers such as New York and San Francisco, concentrations of artists in neighborhoods often become attractors for development of the type experienced in Chicago’s Wicker Park. In cities where housing pressures are less substantial such as Philadelphia or Minneapolis-St. Paul, researchers find that artists often bring neighborhood revitalization of the kind we see in Milwaukee’s Riverwest without much displacement of ethnic or racial minorities or creation of upscale housing. Downtown Milwaukee’s influx of affluent residents has stimulated conversions of underutilized commercial structures and new construction on empty parcels, but a limited amount of displacement. Artists have found havens in Milwaukee’s Riverwest and Bayview neighborhoods that so far possess an immunity to high pressure gentrification. Artists generally tend toward political activism and support a left-leaning, post-materialist political agenda that helps to stabilize the neighborhoods in which they live through the formation of local advocacy groups. In sum, the growth of the arts profession nationally has led to local creations of moderate income but stable compact urban communities. It’s not just the return to the central city of affluent professionals that drives an urban renaissance. The social and economic dynamic of a Riverwest appears to be more friendly than a Wicker Park in overcoming the anguish and tendency to bad faith we all face in making something of our lives. The kind of post-materialism we see taking shape in the Riverwests as opposed to the Wicker Parks of the world may well help us surmount the barriers to an authentic human existence raised in the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre.

A Philosophy for Compact Living: Post-Materialist Meaning and Work

2011-11-06T07:56:00.000-08:00

To repeat one more time, meaning in life comes from adopting and pursuing purposes about which we care passionately. For most of us a substantial portion of our waking being is taken up with paid work, something we must do in order to earn an income to supply the material instruments of life. If meaning comes from materialist ends, then the purpose of work would be to make money and all else would be secondary. While earning an income is the predominant motive for working, the activity of work serves more functions than just a means to material existence. For many of us, work is the social center of our lives. One of the most robust findings of happiness research is the importance of friendships for life satisfaction, and it’s at work where we develop many of our enduring friendships that spill over into our life as a whole. Work can provide more than just money and friends if we are lucky. Truly interesting work challenges our intellectual and physical abilities and causes us to enter into a state of active engagement—what psychologists call flow—where immediate feeling-state concerns evaporate. During the activity of such work, consciousness of pleasure or pain disappears, and it is only after the fact that a warm glow of satisfaction and accomplishment emerges. To top it off, work holds out the possibility of achieving those creative purposes that bring meaning to our life. It is not just the activity of work that matters to us, but the final purpose it serve as well. Of course not all work provides a full range of such benefits. Much work is tedious and boring, offers only limited opportunities for social interactions, and lacks a valued purpose. In such instances, work is undertaken for narrower ends. One could imagine a highly skilled hedge fund manager making millions of dollars but secretly believes the purpose of the work to be trivial or even socially destructive, or a poorly paid nursing home aide who finds the work itself to be tedious and stressful but believes it to be of high social importance.

For post-materialist young professionals, the non-economic dimensions of work take on a special importance. They desire work that allows them to creatively apply their talents and skills to socially valuable undertakings and they want to do this in a socially interesting environment. The recently established General Assembly, a Manhattan incubator for web application and service businesses, fills the post-materialist bill for code-writing entrepreneurs who can rent glassed-off office space abutting a common room where tenants can enjoy a cup of gourmet coffee while chatting with their fellow digital pioneers about the latest web successes and failures. A recent startup, Yipit, an aggregator and analyzer of daily internet commerce deals, began by renting space in the General Assembly, but after successfully generating revenue flows for its services, moved to its own home in nearby office space, Ping-Pong table included. We don’t normally think of New York City as a high technology paradise, but it now trails only San Francisco as a haven for digital startup capital. The blending of work and leisure in New York’s new high tech culture is evident in the new “techie fashion shows, techie reality TV shows, techie entrepreneurs on the Council of Foreign Relations, and techie scalpers hawking tickets outside the New York Tech Meetup, the industry’s premier (and perennially sold-out) monthly event.” New York’s “Silicon Alley” flourishes in part because of the decline of Wall Street as an attractive career path and the desire to avoid being a cog in a bureaucratic wheel and returning to the tradition of “craft work” where the final product of one’s efforts can be directly observed.

Such a vision of work in the new technology world may not apply universally. Zynga, a highly successful internet gaming startup, warranted a New York Times article with the title, “Zynga’s Tough Culture Risks a Talent Drain.” Frustrated workers complain about long hours, stressful deadlines, and a relentless tracking of progress and performance. Those who don’t measure up are quickly shown the door. The esprit de corp common to many internet companies has been replace at Zygna with an intense individualistic meritocracy, but without a serious dent in the company’s economic success. While Zynga may be an outlier in its extremes, intense internal competition amongst employees tends to prevail in the gaming industry. Apparently there is more than one way to skin the high technology organization cat.

Survey research for industrialized countries on how people feel about their working life finds that most are satisfied with their jobs, but that satisfaction is higher where the work is interesting and good relations with management prevail. Opportunities for working independently and good pay also play a role in work satisfaction but fall below the first two factors in importance. These statistical results provide backup for what Richard Florida finds anecdotally in focus group conversations with ‘creative class’ post-materialist young professionals.

Despite feeling satisfied with their work, many Americans are unhappy about the amount of hours in a year they actually spend on the job. About two-thirds want to work fewer hours, around a fifth want to work more hours, and the rest are content. More than forty percent of part-time workers desire either more hours or full-time work. High incomes and a college education results in a preference for reduced working hours, contrary to anecdotal reports of creative class satisfaction with long hours. A post-materialist attachment to the quality of the work itself surprisingly leads to a desire for fewer hours, while unsurprisingly a belief in the importance of earning a high income results in a desire to work more hours. Liking work doesn’t necessarily mean you want long days on the job. Working parents who, more than others, face a time-bind in their daily lives due to family responsibilities surprisingly desire more hours on the job, possibly because of a need for higher income to meet the costs of family or a desire to escape the impositions of family life. Despite our love for children, recall that parental life satisfaction does decline during the child rearing years according to happiness researchers.

In these data about work, we see hints that while young, affluent post-materialists see their jobs as an important part of their life, they also desire time off for other activities. Not all impulses for meaning in life get satisfied at work. A comparison of the U.S. and European experience with work supports these conclusions. Europeans and Americans worked about the same number of hours in a week per person back in the 1970s, but since then the hours worked has declined dramatically in Europe but not in the U.S. Today the French and Germans work about three-fourths of the average hours that Americans work. About a fourth of this results from lower normal weekly working hours and the rest from a combination of more holiday and vacation days and lower workforce participation in Europe relative to the U.S. Survey research finds that Europeans experience an increase in life satisfaction as their hours work decline.

As Americans work more, the likelihood of reporting themselves to be “very happy” rises slightly; as Europeans work more, the likelihood of such a report declines markedly. Europeans clearly prefer to work fewer hours and spend more time seeking their satisfactions outside of work. Americans find happiness in working more hours rather than fewer. Europeans place more value on work to make “life worth living” than Americans. The activity of work matters more to Europeans than Americans, but that doesn’t mean that one needs to adopt work as the whole of one’s meaning in life. Conversely, Americans value the economic results of work more than Europeans. In short, Americans are more materialistic. For Americans, hard work is important as a source of economic success, but this is less the case for Europeans. As one researcher puts it, Americans live to work while Europeans work to live. Europeans tradeoff the satisfactions of work against those of leisure while Americans balance the virtues of leisure against earned income. Americans’ greater materialism and greater desire for income leads to more time on the job than Europeans.

Yet, as reported above, many post-materialist Americans want to work less like Europeans. Germans as a whole hold more post-materialist values than Americans and this is reflected in the desire of Americans to work more, but this doesn’t preclude a substantial subgroup of Americans who want to work less. The post-materialist trend holds in the U.S., but historically not so intensely as in Europe. As post-materialism advances in the U.S. over time, American attitudes towards work will look more European, and U.S. satisfaction with working long hours will likely decline.

A key barrier to shorter hours in the U.S. economy not found in Europe is the way in which health insurance is delivered. In most European countries health insurance coverage is universal and funded largely through government. In the U.S. health insurance for most is tied to employment and the cost is partially funded by employers as a benefit. The very poor receive health insurance from the government through Medicaid and the elderly from Medicare. Because American employers provide very limited health insurance benefits to part-time workers, many would prefer to have full-time work simply to obtain health insurance at a reasonable cost. Buying health insurance in the U.S. on one’s own is a costly proposition. Given that health insurance benefit costs vary with the number of workers and not average hours worked, employers can often save money by hiring fewer workers at longer weekly hours to meet a given product demand. In short, the U.S. health insurance system creates a bias towards a longer average workweek and against part-time jobs with health insurance benefits. In Europe, part-time work can be chosen without sacrificing access to health insurance because its availability is assured by government, but in the U.S. few part-time jobs offer affordable health insurance.

The health insurance issue takes on special importance for a key subgroup of the creative class, the starving artists. Many artists are self-employed in the U.S. and lack access to affordable health insurance. Many also supplement their income from part-time work that lacks health insurance benefits. The health insurance problem forces many American would-be artists to seek full-time work in other fields. Because European artists don’t need to worry about health insurance costs, the experience greater flexibility than Americans in combining their artistic efforts with other kinds of work to supplement their incomes. Anyone who truly wants to work part time in the U.S. will be forced to contend with low pay and a lack of health insurance.

As the Dutch have demonstrated over the past 30 years, part-time work needn’t be marginalized and relegated to a lower economic status than full-time work. The Dutch have adopted government policies that require equalized hourly pay and access to benefits for equivalent part-time and full-time work. Dutch workers also have a right to request reductions in their individual working hours with proportion reductions in pay. Since the introduction of these reforms, the share of part-time work in the Dutch economy has increase dramatically and the hours worked per capita has decline significantly as well. The share of part-time employment in the Netherlands exceeds that for all other European countries, and the Dutch seem to be perfectly happy working less than others. Unlike American part-time workers, very few Dutch desire a shift to full-time employment. All this has been accomplished alongside employment growth and declines in unemployment.

The U.S. has considerable distance to go before equalizing the status of full- and part-time work, but, with recent the recent passage of the Affordable Health Care Act, part-time work in the future will look somewhat more attractive to Americans. Beginning in 2014 under the Act, anyone will be able to acquire health insurance policies on government-run exchanges without having to worry about denial for pre-existing medical conditions. Because the cost of such policies with be subsidized for those with limited incomes, obtaining affordable health insurance coverage as a part-time worker will be much easier. The new health insurance reforms will benefit artists and others who seek satisfaction of their creative impulses outside of conventional full-time work and desire part-time employment to help satisfy their material needs.

Affordable health insurance will increase the appeal of lower paid but more creative work, and this will in turn increase the attractiveness of compact urban neighborhoods for those who choose to pursue a post-materialist path to meaning. If full-time work is required for health insurance, then the higher income that comes with it will make a spatially expansive, consumption-oriented life in the suburbs feasible. If one makes a bundle in less than fully satisfying employment, then you might as well spend it on the pleasures of a comfortable house and the convenience of a luxury motor vehicle. But if conventional full-time work is no longer needed for health insurance, and the pursuit of one’s true passion becomes possible through less remunerative activities, then the likelihood of a turn to a more affordable way of life in a spatially compact setting will increase. We have already laid out key post-materialist attractions of high density urban living such as access to lively neighborhoods, entertainment and the arts, good cuisine, and interesting architecture, but for those on a limited budget other features matter as well such as the ability to find affordable housing, use public instead of private transportation, and substitute public for private space. Life in compact cities is lived more in public arenas, such as parks, squares, libraries, and coffee houses, instead of in spacious suburban houses and big backyards. Entry to public spaces normally costs little while the ownership of private space can be costly. Getting around densely packed cities by mass transit, on foot, or by bike is often more convenient and certainly less expensive than by motor vehicle. Post-materialism as a way of life is available not just to affluent young professionals in urban centers, but, as artists have demonstrated, for those willing to give up income in order to satisfy deeply held creative urges and values. Artists and others who seek a less materially oriented way of living have been at the forefront of carving out an affordable urban niche by revitalizing deteriorated, older central city neighborhoods. If one doesn’t have to face excessive costs for access to health care, then the adoption of a truly post-materialist form of life will be significantly eased and compact living will be given a boost.

Peak Oil Revisited

2011-09-27T08:00:00.000-07:00

Simple logic tells us that the fossil fuels we extract from the earth’s crust are necessarily finite resources. Oil, natural gas, and coal come from fossilized organic matter deposited millions of years ago in a geological process of limited extent and duration. If we continue to extract fossil fuels at anywhere near current rates, their deposits will ultimately approach exhaustion and production will necessarily decline. This constitutes the concept of peak oil. Daniel Yergin, a widely respected expert on energy, questions the near-term validity of peak oil in his new book,The Quest. Previous predictions of peak oil have failed to come to pass and advances in extraction technologies that allow access to more remote and diffuse deposits will likely frustrate forecasts of peak oil for years to come, according to Yergin.

Were we in fact soon to approach global peak oil, petroleum prices would permanently accelerate, causing economic trauma by shifting purchasing power from consumers to already wealthy petroleum sheiks and dictators and oil giants such as Exxon Mobil and BP. If not offset by government fiscal actions, this shift in purchasing power would substantially dampen global economy activity as it did in the energy crisis of the 1970s. A virtuous consequence of such a price rise would be a hastened shift to alternative sources of energy, such as solar, wind, biofuels, and nuclear power, and a retardation in the volume of carbon dioxide and other global temperature increasing greenhouses making their way into the earth’s atmosphere. The trouble with waiting for peak oil is the economic damage it would cause and the added global warming that will result before the peak is reached. Both can be avoided through a slowly increasing publicly imposed user fee per ton for greenhouse admissions that will encourage a steady and orderly shift to clean energy. Polluters who cause public harm, simply put, ought to pay for the costs of their actions. A greenhouse gas polluter user fee is a price paid for the disposal of wastes into the earth’s atmosphere, much as we currently pay for the cost of our trash disposal in landfills. The revenues from a user fee can be returned to the public as tax reductions or used to fund decreases in our public debt or to pay for needed public investments. In Daniel Yergin’s eyes, waiting for peak oil would be like waiting for Godot; we expect him to show up, but he never does.

Even if peak oil is not on the horizon, doing something about global warming still stands before us as a moral imperative, but one that will cost us very little in the end to achieve. Let me review why I think this to be the case. In my previous blog posts and in my book, The Coming Good Boom, I have made the case for the following conclusions which I will not repeat here:

A global greenhouse emissions user fee that by 2030 rises to $100 per ton of CO2and equivalent emissions will stabilize climate by 2050 and cause fossil fuels to be largely supplanted by clean energy. Cap and trade would work just as well to accomplish this goal, but its adoption now seems politically unlikely in the U.S.
Given such a user fee, by 2050 the bulk of U.S. spending on petroleum imports undertaken today will have been diverted to a domestic clean energy industry creating millions of new jobs. In effect, income in the process will be transferred from wealthy owners of foreign oil reserves to American workers. This gain will be dampened somewhat if China gets the upper hand in solar panel production, but not totally eliminated.
An economic boom in the U.S. will in all probability be fostered by the process of adjusting to a new energy reality. The engines of expansion will occur not only in the arenas of clean energy and energy efficiency, but also as the consequence of a move to a more compact form of living. This will set off heavy investment in mass transit and urban development along new transit lines. A revolution in agricultural will also likely occur shifting it from fossil fuel intensive practices in meat and dairy production to more labor intensive and environmentally friendly grass-based approaches.
As greenhouse emissions user fees rise, households will see their energy bills increase, but will have the option of reducing such costs through improvements in energy efficiency and the substitution of clean for carbon-based energy purchases. A greenhouse user fee will be increasingly avoidable over time as a new clean energy sector is created. Economic theory predicts that the fossil fuel industry itself will bear an increasing share of the user fee over time because of such household actions. By 2050 the cost of energy as a percent of average household under the new energy regime will be the same or only slightly more than it is today.

Households in this country will face very little real burden from polluter user fees that bring about climate stability, and a number of households will gain from expanding economic opportunities associated with new approaches to energy, agriculture, and urban living. In short, solving the climate change problem will ultimately cost us very little and as a bonus will improve the health of our economy. User fees provide a huge source of revenues that can be returned to consumers in an income equalizing fashion to offset recent harmful expansions in economic inequality. Some of these funds can also be used for reducing the federal debt and to finance public investments that will move the energy revolution along. Even if peak oil turns out to not be a problem, unhooking ourselves from fossil fuels will be a good deal.

Energy consuming, spatially expansive living is our dream and passion in the U.S. Yet our compactly developed older cities are experiencing something of a renaissance. This phenomenon is not being driven by any special economic trends, such as dramatically higher energy costs on a European scale that would push people toward denser more energy efficient living. Neither has there been any substantial shift in planning laws, such as a growing use of urban growth boundaries, that would force central city infill development and limit suburban expansion. The trend seems to be occurring on its own, suggesting possibly a shift in attitudes about compact forms of living. This is an especially virtuous trend for meeting the challenge of global warming. Because they live at such high densities, New York City residents on average emit less than half the carbon of a typical American. A simple increase in the density of urban settlement in this country would take us a long way toward limiting our greenhouse gas emissions. Transformations in human values and attitudes do occur, and to find out why with respect to compact living requires us to consider in detail the source of the things we care about most deeply. We need a “philosophy of compact" living rooted in human perceptions of life’s meaning as it relates to how we arrange ourselves spatially in the world. This topic I will take up in future posts.

Earth Day Economics: A Green and Prosperous Future (Published in The Shepherd Express, Milwaukee, WI, 4/13/2011)

2011-04-14T05:34:00.001-07:00

The astounding success of the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970 under the tutelage of a true Wisconsin hero, Senator Gaylord Nelson, marked the coming of age of the environmental movement in this country. Environmental victories in the 1970s included the passage of such landmark legislation as the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species Acts. Earth Day ushered in a new environmental era, and today the quality of our lives is much improved for it.

Unfortunately, our work remains unfinished.

Our single greatest environmental threat today is global warming brought to us by the burning of fossil fuels to power our cars, heat our homes, grow our food, and fabricate and operate all our wonderful consumer gadgets. Scientists tell us that greenhouse gases from fossil fuels act like a “tea cozy” around the earth bringing forth dangerous environmental harms reported in the news now on a daily basis—a shrinking polar ice cap, rising sea levels, more powerful storms, droughts, wildfires, and threats to endangered species.

Bringing global warming to a halt can be accomplished with a simple act—freeing ourselves from the environmental tyranny of fossil fuels. Some will say this is easier said than done, but doing so will bring on what I call a “good boom,” an economic expansion based on a turn to compact living and clean energy that will lift all our boats.

The first task in reversing climatic warming is to use less energy, and, thankfully, easy money-saving and life-improving steps are available including weatherizing our homes, buying energy efficient appliances, installing low energy light bulbs, and using energy efficient cars and public transit. Both the quality of our lives and the amount of energy we consume bears an intimate connection to where we live. Residing in compact urban neighborhoods instead of a spatially expansive suburbs will reduce our energy consumption by a third or more. The urban renaissance occurring in Milwaukee’s Bayview, Brady Street, the Third and Fifth Wards, and Walker’s Point demonstrates that living at high density can be exciting and rewarding. These neighborhoods offer ready access to work opportunities, an interesting and esthetically pleasing housing stock, a vibrant street life, entertainment, shopping, libraries, galleries, coffee houses, and cafes, and the ease of getting around on foot, by bike, or on a bus. Compact cities and neighborhoods benefit both us and the environment.

Milwaukee, as already reported in the Shepherd Express, is on the cutting edge of both the energy conserving “buy local” movement and its natural complement, urban farming. In Growing Power’s refurbished greenhouse on the northwest side and Sweet Water Organic’s rescued Bayview factory building, water circulates from tanks filled with lake perch and tilapia to trays of leafy plants above them and back again in a closed loop that cycles nutrients from fish to plants and clean water back to fish. Both operations use much less energy than their conventional rural competitors for getting food on our tables, and both offer a boon to the local economy by creating a totally new kind of employment for Milwaukee’s residents.

Necessary to moving beyond fossil fuels is a switch to truly clean sources of renewable energy. Notwithstanding Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s attempt to bring wind energy to a screeching halt with onerous regulations, both wind and sun are the primary energy sources of the future. As we do more of anything in our economy, the cost inevitably falls, and this is happening already for both wind and solar energy. The Great Plains is on track to becoming the Saudi Arabia of wind energy, and throughout the Midwest industrial belt old factories are quickly being refitted to produce wind generators and solar panels. Despite the naysayers, the wind and solar energy revolution is underway, bringing forth an abundance of new jobs—windsmiths, solar panel installers, weatherization specialists, solar engineers, wind and solar equipment fabricators, and, here in Milwaukee, urban farmers.

To be sure, the fossil fuel industry will resist going quietly and will defend to the death its right to pollute the atmosphere without cost. Eventually, the industry will lose this battle and will pay the public piper through some form of a tax on greenhouse gas emissions. Given the huge amount of revenues such a tax could generate, and the need to reduce our federal budget deficits, resistance to it will ultimately melt away. This will be especially true once we fully recognize that an emissions tax will redirect trillions of dollars from the petroleum dictators of the world to our own domestic clean energy sector. Fossil fuel’s unjustified competitive edge will finally be taken away, and clean energy will win out creating an economic boom that will serve us all.

Fish, Vegetables, and Milwaukee’s Coming Good Boom: Sweet Water Organics

2011-03-07T05:30:00.000-08:00

Tanks filled with lake perch and tilapia and trays of leafy plants above them in an old factory building two short miles to the south of Milwaukee’s downtown in the newly popular Bay View neighborhood could well be one of the city’s future engines of economic and environmental progress. It’s hard to imagine that economic advance in an old industrial city could ever be traced to ordinary commodities such as vegetables and fish, but Sweet Water Organics may just prove this to be the case. Founded in 2009, Sweet Water currently raises some 55,000 yellow perch and tilapia in raceways embedded in the concrete floor of an aging but spacious factory building located in Milwaukee’s south side industrial belt. Instead of exploiting natural habitats for good things to eat, Sweet Water leaves nature alone and creates an aquatic environment that mimics a wetland in a highly compact urban space to produce fish and vegetables for human consumption. The production cycle is amazing in its simplicity. Fish wastes provide nutrients for plants, and plants in turn cleanse the water for the fish. Water ladened with fish wastes is pumped from the raceways up to double deck beds where it flows across pea gravel containing bacteria that break down ammonia and other wastes into nitrates that plants can use for food. The nutrient-rich water is pumped up to a middle bed of watercress plants for additional filtering and then to a top deck where it fertilizes a variety of potted herbs, sprouts, and vegetables. The cleansed water then flows back down to the fish tanks. The only inputs into the system currently are commercial fish food and energy for pumps, heating, and grow lights which supplement natural lighting from clearstory windows. In a secondary cycle, composting of food wastes gathered from local businesses creates both a mineral-rich plant growing medium as well as worms that will eventually replace the commercial fish food now in use. The composting system may also eventually provide heat for the fish tanks reducing the need for external energy inputs once technical problems are ironed out.

Sweet Water Organics offers a fascinating model for fostering a business expansion in Milwaukee of a new kind—a good economic boom that will not only bring economic prosperity in its wake but will help resolve environmental ills as well. A coming economy-wide good boom, as I have argued this blog, will be built on a turn to compact living and clean energy fostered by the need to solve the problem of global warming. As things stand, prices today for gasoline, coal, and other fossil fuels don’t account for the environmental costs of climate change, and reversing climatic warming will require correcting this error by placing a real cost on greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels. As a consequence of doing so, fossil fuel prices will rise, giving us a strong incentive for turning to green energy and spatially compact forms of living that not only reduce energy consumption, but leave more space on the planet available for nature. Sweet Water, through its innovative scheme of production, is helping us realize both of these goals, as we will now explain.

Expanding nature’s space follows from the Sweet Water’s quest to mimic natural processes in the design of its system for producing fish and vegetables. Raising fish in a building that would otherwise stand empty substitutes for the commercial extraction of fish from the wild and helps to abate further threats to already over-exploited global fish populations. In essence, Sweet Water’s human created ecosystem is being substituted for the exploitation of a natural one leaving more undisturbed space for nature. Sweat Waters cultivation of vegetables in high-rise tiers of planters above its fish tanks also constrains human expansion into the natural world. Anyone who has ever spent much time in California’s valley landscapes knows how much space vegetable production normally requires. In these places for as far as the eye can see land is devoted to what ends up on our dinner plate. If you dine at a Milwaukee restaurant such as the historic Third Ward’s Coquette Cafe, or if you buy your produce at Outpost Natural Foods Coop, chances are your salad greens will have come from nearby Sweet Water where next to no land at all is needed for their growth. Less land in agriculture translates into more land for nature.

Mimicking natural cycles in a spatially compact space, such as Sweet Water’s old factory building, also helps our global quest to reduce energy consumption and lessen greenhouse gas emissions. The norm in conventional industrial vegetable cultivation in such places as California and Florida is the heavy usage of fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides, all of which require huge amounts of fossil fuels to produce. One sees none of this around Sweet Water Organics. The act of industrial vegetable cultivation itself requires the use of fossil fuel powered tractors and harvesters, and the shipping of produce to market from far afield itself absorbs substantial amounts of energy. This is avoided at Sweet Water where cultivation is an act of human labor and shipping both vegetables and fish to market is a highly local affair. The norm these days for fish caught on the high seas is to air freight them from all corners of the earth to urban markets, a step which is avoided by Sweet Water’s location in close proximity to its customers. The need for heat and grow lights constitute the only energy inputs Sweet Water requires which eventually can be supplied from local solar installations or from Wisconsin’s abundant wind energy. Sweet Water produces food for local consumption using local resources and the only significant input that comes from afar is commercial fish feed which compost-produced worms can eventually curtail.

Sweet Water’s decision to locate in older urban neighborhood reinforces a recent increase in the popularity of living at higher densities in older central cities like Milwaukee. The bloom is off suburban living and young and old alike are looking to the city for a more interesting place to live. In her classic work, The Life and Death of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs sets out the features that defines successful urban neighborhoods—high density, a diversity of businesses and residential dwellings in close proximity, a vibrant street life, and a pedestrian friendly street layout. Neighborhoods with these characteristics make it possible for people to work, reside, and recreate all within a walkable area. The presence of people on the streets throughout the day going to work or school, shopping, or drinking an espresso in a sidewalk cafe creates a lively environment of the kind especially attractive to urban dwellers. Bay View has such features and the presence of Sweet Water benefits the neighborhood by creating employment opportunities within easy reach of affordable and interesting housing. Compact living in a neighborhood like Bay View is not only enjoyable, but has the special value of limiting the need to consume fossil fuel energy for getting around in carrying out the tasks and pleasures of everyday life.

Economists like to say “there is no such thing as a free lunch.” They mean by this that whenever we spend resources on one activity, we can’t put those resources to use doing something else. Everything we decide to do has a cost in the form of a lost opportunity. In its use of an unemployed building that would have otherwise stood empty, Sweet Water is a living refutation of the “no free lunch doctrine.” Putting old industrial building to a new use is in effect a spatial free lunch. By doing this, we don’t need to expand outward into green spaces surrounding a city taking up more land and we don’t need to use up scarce natural resources for new construction. Sweet Water is also creating employment opportunities in a community with an ample supply of high quality housing and in area where unemployed workers need jobs. Putting the unemployed to work also constitutes a free lunch given their lack of alternative options for earning a living. Creating jobs within the city’s boundaries has the bonus of taking pressure off of outward suburban expansion and the increased use of space and energy that goes with it.

The continuation of all these benefits to the environment and the local community from Sweet Water of course depends on its ultimate success. The hope of its founders is to be profitably producing and marketing upwards of 500,000 pounds of perch annually and 1,000 pounds of produce a week in a few years, employing as many as 40 workers in the Milwaukee area at multiple sites, a substantial expansion from Sweet Water’s current six employees. Milwaukee is already a mini-Silicon Valley for aquaponics pioneered by Growing Power, a nonprofit organization with the purpose of bringing good food to Milwaukee’s inner city led by MacArthur Foundation Fellow, Will Allen. Sweet Water’s essential goal is to prove that Growing Power’s methods can be the basis for profitable business expansion in the Milwaukee area. The future is always uncertain, but one can easily imagine that a new kind of urban agriculture could be an essential engine of a future “good boom” in Milwaukee.

Is Chinese Clean Energy Competition Good or Bad for the U.S.?

2011-02-04T06:46:00.000-08:00

Evergreen Solar, the third-largest producer of solar panels in the U.S., will be closing its main plant in Massachusetts, laying off 800 employees, and moving its operation to central China. Lower wages usually explain why businesses make such moves, but for solar panel manufacturing labor makes up a minor share of total operating costs. Evergreen’s advantage from relocation lies in obtaining a large loan at a low borrowing rate from a state-owned bank with the help of its local Chinese partners. As the result of this and other kinds of subsidies, Chinese manufacturers can sell solar panels in the U.S. at a $1.60 per watt, well below Evergreen’s $2 a watt U.S. manufacturing costs. Chinese solar panel factories account for a little over half the world’s production and control almost a quarter of the U.S. market. In both solar and wind energy, China has followed a proven strategy of inviting in foreign companies, learning their technologies, and subsidizing the growth of domestic spinoffs. With an expanding domestic market for clean energy, government requirements for domestic content, and subsidized loans and site costs, Chinese solar manufacturers have quickly achieved scale economies and reduced production costs, allowing them to outcompete their rivals on the global stage. China also invests heavily in science and engineering education with the hope of becoming its own innovator in green technologies. On top of this, China depresses the value of its currency in international markets, effectively subsidizing its exports, although an accelerating Chinese inflation rate is eroding the benefits of an undervalued currency by boosting export prices. Government-aided growth of China’s clean energy sector have many wondering about U.S. future prospects in this field.

An expanding domestic clean energy sector could be an especially powerful engine of U.S. employment growth by staunching the current drain on domestic economic activity from imported petroleum. When you buy a gallon of gasoline, almost 90 cents on the dollar goes to oil sheiks and petroleum dictators around the world with little of that finding its way back to the U.S. If China takes over the U.S. clean energy market, one drain would in effect be substituted for another.

A further look at the market for solar energy suggests, however, that worries about Chinese competition may be overstated. Solar cell modules in the U.S. currently accounts for about half the cost of an installed solar system (a bit less for residential and a bit more for commercial and utility systems). Module prices presently run about $2 a watt, but are dropping rapidly in part because of Chinese competition. The magic benchmark of $1 a watt where solar begins to outcompete conventional energy seems well within reach. If this benchmark were achieved today, solar module costs would drop to about a third of the total for solar installations. This means that as much as two-thirds of this cost would go to domestic businesses that manufacture supporting equipment for solar and undertake system design, installation, and maintenance. In a worst case scenario where the Chinese fully capture U.S. solar panel sales, the domestic content of the solar industry would still be substantial, and replacing fossil fuels with solar would still provide a significant boost to the U.S. economy. The Chinese could be doing us a favor by driving solar panel costs down to the point where solar outcompetes fossil fuels. The U.S. Department of Energy originally projected solar module costs to not drop to near a dollar a watt until 2020, but this target will now be realized much sooner than expected due in part to competition from low cost Chinese manufacturing.

Complete Chinese dominance of the solar module market seems unlikely given the U.S. capacity for technological innovation. Arizona’s First Solar, the world leader in thin film solar technology, claims that it has already cracked the $1 a watt cost barrier, suggesting that it will be close on Chinese solar heals in the global marketplace. Thin film panels are made from less costly cadmium tellurium instead of silicon. The primary customers for thin film are utilities because of lower solar conversion rates and larger space requirements, not rooftop installations. Some analysts predict that thin film costs per watt will fall to 65-75 cents by 2012.

Without further action, the future of clean energy looks bright in the U.S. even with stiff competition from abroad. Nonetheless, placing a price on carbon emissions either through cap and trade or a carbon tax would move the coming clean energy revolution along even more quickly. Doing so would take away an unfair subsidy that fossil fuel producers now get for their zero cost use of the global atmosphere to dispose of waste carbon and other pollutants. Removing this subsidy would increase the cost of fossil fuels, accelerating the shift to clean energy. A price on carbon has the added virtue of providing a revenue source for doing many good things such as reducing the federal debt, decreasing economic inequities, accelerating clean energy development, and expanding energy efficient public transit.

With the Republican ascendancy in the recent election, the chances for cap and trade or a carbon tax seem remote. Nonetheless, recent talk of major tax reform to reduce the federal debt could open up an opportunity in the future for placing a price on carbon. A carbon price could easily generate enough revenue to cut the national debt in half over the next forty years with funds left over for other purposes. Despite poor prospects in the immediate future, the eventual adoption of a price on carbon remains a distinct possibility. In the meantime, the near-term political prospects for a clean energy standard seem to have brightened as a reasonable “second best” approach.

In his recent State of the Union, President Obama called for a requirement that utilities generate 80 percent of their energy from clean sources by 2035. His definition of clean energy includes nuclear power, clean coal, natural gas, as well as solar, wind, and other renewable sources. Given the high cost of nuclear and clean coal, they will probably play a minor role in future electricity generation, but may bring political support from a few Republicans. Natural gas emits about half the carbon as coal per unit energy, but remains a big source of carbon pollution. Environmentalists question its inclusion as a clean energy source, but political realities make it tough to leave out. Even with natural gas in the mix, the role of solar and wind in meeting the clean energy 2035 target would likely be substantial and could accelerate the decline in cost per watt for these sources through market expansion. Combined with increased CAFE mileage requirements for motor vehicles and tightened efficiency standards for appliances, a clean energy standard constitutes a reasonable strategy for moving us along to a wind and solar based energy economy.

Increased competition from China may turn out to be a blessing in the legislative arena by placing pressure on lawmakers to do something that will benefit the U.S. clean energy sector. China’s clean energy advances also give it a large and growing economic interest in cutting its own carbon emissions, which is especially important since it is the world’s largest emitter. In the larger scheme of things, Chinese competition may well be a good thing for both the U.S. economy and the global environment.

Announcing Publication of THE COMING GOOD BOOM in Paperback

2010-12-06T06:02:00.000-08:00

A paperback or digital copy can be purchased at Amazon.com

From the Forward:

Economists like to say that there is no such thing as a ‘free lunch’ whenever we move our social arrangements in a new direction. According to this kind of thinking, a price will inevitably be paid for addressing big, society-wide problems such as global warming. This book takes a contrary view—resolving the problem of global warming and moving to a more spatially compact form of human settlement will generate a durable and widespread prosperity and improvements in the quality of life. In short, fixing global warming will be a ‘free lunch’. We will all end up being better off independently of any gains to the climate or the natural environment. The turn to clean energy and spatial compactness will set off an unprecedented economic boom driven by innovation in energy conservation, production, and distribution and by increased high density urban living and the private and public construction that will go with it. Unlike the economic expansions of recent decades, growth induced by a shift to clean energy and compact living will truly lift all economic boats. Turning to compact green living and freeing ourselves from the environmental tyranny of fossil fuels will set off an investment boom of a new kind—a good boom that will help cure some of our most intractable social and environmental ills. This combination of ideas is the unique and original contribution of this book.

Postscript to The Coming Good Boom: A Clean Energy Employment and Debt Reduction Act of 2013

2010-11-03T07:01:00.000-07:00

With the tea-party and big-money fed Republican takeover of the House in the 2010 midterm elections, the far right in American politics will be able to frustrate any legislation increasing government involvement in the economy no matter how rational and market oriented. This means cap and trade proposals will be shelved and the fossil fuel industry will recapture its political dominion, at least for the time being. As the global economy recovers down the road, peak oil will kick in with a vengeance and bring forth upward spikes in energy prices, enriching petroleum oligarchs, sheiks, and dictators. This will be the harsh alternative reality to a more measured process of adjustment offered by cap and trade. About this the American electorate will not be pleased, and the present public grumpiness will look pale by comparison. Putting cap and trade in effect sooner rather than later would decapitate peak oil and its upward price surges. In two years time when the current political craziness abates, cooler heads will hopefully prevail and cap and trade can be brought back off the shelf in time to do some good. I do believe that such legislation carries with it so much potential for solving this country’s economic and fiscal problems, that it is bound to ultimately reappear on the legislative docket, especially if it is repackaged and simplified to place its real benefits in sharper focus and renamed something like the “Clean Energy Employment and Debt Reduction Act of 2013.” Let me explain the virtues of this approach with some simple ‘back of the envelope’ calculations.

We in the U.S. spent nearly $495 billion on imported petroleum in 2008. The U.S. Department of Energy projects that the prices of imported petroleum will rise in inflation adjusted terms by about 1 percent a year through 2035 while our consumption will decline by .3 percent a year. If we extend this projection another 15 years, by 2050 our spending on imported petroleum will rise to $664 billion annually, given continued reliance on fossil fuels as our primary energy source.

The essential macroeconomic effect of our import spending is to generate demand for goods, employment, and income in foreign countries, not in the U.S. The more we spend on imported oil, the greater the income earned by foreign oil producers, and the richer the Saudi Arabia’s of the world become. Such increases of foreign wealth will create some demand for U.S. products such as Cadillac Escalades and Boeing aircraft, but only a small share of our spending on imported oil will return to the U.S. shores through the sale of U.S. exports. Saudi Arabian acquisition of U.S. goods amounts to only about 25 percent of our spending on their oil.

If the emission caps of H.R. 2454 (the 2009 House-passed cap and trade bill) were implemented, carbon emissions would drop to 17 percent of 2005 levels by 2050. This will mean the virtual disappearance of the petroleum industry and its replacement by domestic clean energy. In short, cap and trade will create a new U.S.-based energy industry to replace petroleum, and this will mean a redirection of spending from energy imports to the domestic economy. The beneficiaries of this shift will be the owners and employees of businesses in wind and solar energy as well as energy conservation. Such gains from an expansion of clean energy will ripple throughout the total economy with incomes earned by wind generator mechanics and solar panel installers triggering new spending on restaurant meals, clothing, electronic gadgets and so on, lending a further stimulus to economic activity and employment. Cap and trade, in sum, will take American spending out of the hands of Arab oil sheiks and petroleum dictators and return it to our own citizens.

Predicting future employment is a perilous task in any circumstance, but we can nonetheless get some ideas about the order of its magnitude for the creation of a domestic clean energy industry. The first step is to establish roughly how much spending will be redirected from petroleum imports to our domestic economy by cap and trade. The total amount of projected spending on imported petroleum for the period 2012 to 2050 equals roughly $21 trillion. With carbon caps, this spending will shrink annually over time as the number of available carbon emission allowances diminish. Given fully implemented H.R. 2454 caps from 2016 on, the amount of allowances in that year will equal 5.4 billion tons of CO2 and will decline steadily to 1.3 tons in 2050. Caps will force a reduction in the consumption of domestically produced and imported petroleum over time, and we Americans will spend roughly $8.9 trillion less on imported petroleum through 2050 than we would without cap and trade.

Energy expenditures per household will increase very little if at all from cap and trade because of increases in energy efficiency and the realization of scale economies in clean energy production, and what we now spend on imported petroleum will be redirected to our domestic energy industry due to cap and trade. To compensate for some likely spending drains to imports of clean energy equipment and losses in exports to oil producing countries, we will assume that 75 percent of reduced U.S. petroleum imports will equal the upward shift in aggregate demand for the economy as a whole, rising to a permanent increase of $400 billion by 2050. As explained in Chapter 13, each $100 billion in additional annual clean energy spending creates approximately 2 million jobs in an economy suffering from significant unemployment. Beginning in 2016, the addition to jobs will equal 154,000 and by 2050 will rise to 8 million and continue at that level thereafter. Once implemented, cap and trade will be a job creating machine.

Besides generating employment, cap and trade will also produce significant amounts of revenue from government auctions of emission allowances. If emission allowance prices rise to $100 a metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions by 2030 and remain there (as explained in Chapter 13), the total potential revenues for 2012-2050 will add up to something like $8.3 trillion. If the government used all these revenues to reduce the federal debt, a drag on consumer and business incomes would occur, dampening employment increases from the creation of a new clean energy industry. The cap and trade bill (H.R. 2454) avoids this problem by returning most of the emission allowance revenues to the public through 2030.

The beauty of the cap and trade bill is this: it will create enduring additions to employment and a source of future government revenues that can permanently reduce the federal debt to the tune of up to 4 trillion dollars if all emission allowance auction collections after 2030 are devoted to this purpose. In short, we can let the employment creation machine run for the next twenty years by returning cap and trade revenues to the public, and after that devote revenues to debt retirement. We could even accelerate the employment recovery by increasing government spending on clean energy sector in the next two decades (as suggested in Chapter 13), financing it with bonds to be retired after 2030 from emission allowance revenues. With a near-full employment economy by 2030, the economic drag created by debt retirement will not likely be a problem and may even be welcome to push against the winds of economic overheating and inflation.

Predicting the distant future is a dangerous business—most who do so turn out to be wrong. Even if one assigned a 50 percent range of error to my 'back of the envelope calculations', doing what I suggest would still be worthwhile. The underlying logic of my argument here is incredibly simple—creating a domestic clean energy sector to replace imported petroleum can’t help but create jobs, and cap and trade can’t help but generate substantial government revenues, some of which can be applied to government debt reduction.

Peak Oil, Climate, and Compact Living

2010-01-27T07:14:00.000-08:00

Recent global and local political events suggest a fairly high probability that government efforts to restrict greenhouse gas emissions could turn out to be modest at best. After the chaos at Copenhagen and struggles over cap and trade in the U.S. Senate, optimism about tackling global warming head on seems to be waning. What if next to nothing of substance is done to unhook us globally from fossil fuels as our primary source of energy? If this were the case, then climate will ultimately warm by anywhere from 5 to 6 degrees Celsius according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). If “peak oil” theory turns out to be true, beyond about 2040 we will be on the downward slope of fossil fuel supplies in the face of continuing global growth in energy demand. This will mean accelerating increases in the price of energy and a huge income transfer from the world as a whole to the already wealthy owners of fossil fuel reserves. As energy prices accelerate because of growing fossil fuel scarcity, we will ultimately be forced to shift to green energy and a compact form of life as described in previous posts, but only after we have been shaken down by Arab oil sheiks for trillions of dollars. We can avoid this and give a huge boost to our domestic economy by unhooking ourselves from the tyranny of fossil fuels sooner rather than later. Doing nothing to move to clean energy now is a collectively brainless thing to do, not only because of the consequences for climate change, but because of immediate harm to our own narrow economic self-interest. Let me now explain.

The IPCC in its latest report, “Climate Change 2007” sets out a range of scenarios for addressing global warming. The most aggressive strategy calls for reducing global emissions 50 to 85 percent below 2000 levels by 2050. If we are able to do so, warming will be limited to 2-2.4 degrees Celsius. Under the least aggressive strategy emissions could grow to as much as 140 percent of 2000 levels by 2050, and the climate could ultimately warm as much as 6 degrees Celsius (11 degrees or so Fahrenheit). Under the most aggressive strategy, a carbon equivalent emission allowance price somewhere near $100 per metric ton range will be required by 2030 to dampen emissions sufficiently to hold climate change in check, while under the least aggressive the carbon price will need to be no more than $20. A concrete commitment by the U.S. to unhook itself from fossil fuels by 2050 would do the world a huge good turn by getting the ball rolling on climate stabilization.

Although good turns are morally uplifting, we can instead look to our own immediate self-interest as justification for moving quickly as possible to a clean energy, carbon emission-free economy. For starters, we will have little choice but to make this move eventually according to the concept of “peak oil”. The logic of peak oil is impeccable. The earth’s crust necessarily contains a finite amount of fossil fuel deposits; with exploitation of these deposits, at some point in historical time the rate of feasible production will reach its maximum and begin a slide downward. The essential question for us is when? This idea was controversial for many years after being introduced in the 1950s by Shell Oil petroleum geologist, M. King Hubbert, who argued that worldwide peak oil would be reached by the year 2000. While that prediction proved inaccurate, today experts agree that the global peak will arrive by 2040. This is the central conclusion of a 2007 U.S. General Accounting Office study on the need for a public response to the inevitability of peak oil. With continued rapid growth in energy demand, the economic effects of declining oil production are not hard to predict—accelerating petroleum prices. Imported crude oil prices facing the U.S. between 2008 and 2035 are already projected by the U.S. Department of Energy to grow by 1 percent a year above the annual rate of inflation. As the production peak is reached, this rate of price growth will undoubtedly accelerate without a concerted movement to get unhooked from fossil fuels. Shifting to natural gas and coal will be a partial but temporary solution to a scarcity in crude petroleum. A global peak in both natural gas and coal production will not be far behind oil according to the experts. Simply put, beyond 2040, rising fossil fuel prices will force us to shift to alternative energy sources even if we do nothing beforehand to limit greenhouse gas emissions by reducing fossil fuel consumption.

The obvious question to ask is this: why not unhook ourselves from fossil fuels and turn to compact living sooner rather than later? As of 2006 we were spending $330 billion on petroleum imports annually. The Department of Energy projects a rough stability in the volume of these imports through 2035 but rising real petroleum import prices (inflation adjusted) to the tune of 1 percent a year. If these trends prevail beyond 2035, then by 2050 we will be spending more than $500 billion a year on petroleum imports in today’s dollars. Over the entire period from 2006 through 2050 our import spending will amount to a bit more than $18 trillion. Perhaps 25 percent of this figure will return to our shores as U.S. export purchases leaving some 14 trillion in the hands of oil sheiks and others to be disposed of elsewhere. In short, our spending on energy currently benefits relatively well-to-do owners of petroleum reserves outside the U.S. Fortunately for us, this need not be the case. Instead of a huge income transfer to wealthy foreigners lucky enough to own oil reserves, we could instead direct that income to our own citizens in return for the creation of clean energy. In the end, after such a transition our average household energy bill in today’s dollars will increase only modestly, if at all, according to U.S. Department of Energy cost projections. About 5 million jobs will be permanently created as because of a shift to clean energy, many of which will be well paying and located in economically stressed central cities and rural areas (see my post, 9/9/2009). In short, instead of adding to the wealth and power of Arab sheiks and oil-supported dictators, we could create a domestic clean energy economy that brings growing economic prosperity for many of our fellow citizens and increasing economic security for everyone.

Getting Political on Clean Energy: A Proposal

2010-01-22T07:18:00.000-08:00

We progressives need to take a page from the Republican playbook. It’s time to re-package the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (HR 2454) as the American Tax and Deficit Reduction Act of 2010. Let me explain.

Let’s begin by stripping everything out of the Clean Energy Act except for bare-bones cap and trade and the existing schedule of carbon emissions caps. Require that all cap-and-trade emission allowances be auctioned off with the revenues deposited in the U.S. Treasury. Use the revenues for three purposes: across the board income tax reductions, increases in earned income tax credits (so the poor benefit), and deficit reduction. From 2012 through 2050 under the existing caps in the Clean Energy Act, on the order of 5 to 8 trillion dollars in revenue will be generated from allowance auctions assuming reasonably that the allowance price will increase to somewhere around $100 a metric ton by 2030 and persist near that level through 2050. Front-load the tax reductions and credits to help along our sputtering economic recovery from the Great Recession. Require that a fixed share of the total of all revenues collected go to deficit reduction, but delay action on this requirement until after 2020 or later to allow economic recovery plenty of time to take hold. The economic burden of rising fossil fuel costs will not be noticeable for a decade or more because of the projected slow rise in carbon allowance prices from shrinking caps, but the benefits will kick in right away. Taxpayers will get economic relief immediately and political concerns about deficit spending should melt away. By the time carbon allowance prices rise to significant levels, an economic boom should be underway sparked by the creation of an entirely new domestic clean energy industry located within the borders of our own country. No longer will we be shaken down by Arab oil sheiks to the turn of $400 billion annually for imported oil. This money will instead be diverted to American businesses and workers. A shift to clean energy of such a magnitude will cause economies of scale to kick in and prevent significant increases in the typical consumer’s total energy bill. By 2050 we will have gotten ourselves unhooked from fossil fuels, and if other countries follow suit, the problem of global warming will have been stopped in its tracks.

The immediate political benefits of such an approach are obvious. Democrats get to deliver what Republicans love best of all—tax cuts. On top of this, the Democrats will be able to point to concrete achievements on reducing the national debt as well as stimulating job growth and economic recovery. I honestly don’t see how Republicans or fossil fuel industry lobbyists could gain much political traction opposing cap and trade set in the context of income tax and deficit reduction. Who says there is no such thing as a free lunch?

The Economic Equivalence of Cap and Trade and a Carbon Tax

2010-01-05T06:46:00.000-08:00

Debate pops up from time-to-time in the media about the relative virtues of a carbon tax and a carbon cap and trade system. Some argue for a tax because of its simplicity, while others argue for cap and trade primarily because it is not a tax. In practice, the two approaches are economically equivalent as long as we have accurate projections on the relationship between a carbon tax and resulting emission reductions.

Under cap and trade, a cap on emissions is set and marketable emissions allowances are created by the government equal in number to the tons of carbon emission equivalents allowed within the cap. These allowances are then either auctioned off or given away. An emitter of greenhouse gases would be required by law to obtain allowances for each ton of carbon equivalents released into the atmosphere. The interplay of demand and supply for such allowances would establish their actual price.

Under a carbon tax, the government directly sets the price for carbon and the volume of carbon emissions emerges as the result of market forces. A higher tax encourages greater reductions in emissions by stimulating a more substantial shift to clean energy and more energy conservation. Gasoline at 4 dollars a gallon because of a higher carbon tax will lead to more fuel efficient hybrid cars on the road than, say, 3 dollar gas. If the tax equals the carbon allowance price that would occur under cap and trade, then the two approaches to limiting emissions would be equivalent. Each would yield the same prices for gasoline and other fuels. If the government knew ahead of time the exact response of all carbon emitters, then the tax could be selected to limit emissions to a specified amount (or cap). In its most recent report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that a carbon tax (or price) of roughly $100 per metric ton by 2030 will put us on a path to limiting global temperature changes to about a 2 degree Celsius average. Either a $100 tax or a cap yielding a $100 carbon price will lead to the same result. Under either regime, the incentives to get unhooked from carbon emitting fuels will be the same. Cap and trade and carbon tax would be economically equivalent.

The problem is, no one can know ahead of time exactly what the tax should be to obtain a certain limit on emissions. Maybe the IPCC will be right in its prediction that a $100 a ton will bring about the desired amount of emissions reduction, but then again maybe it won’t. If the tax turns out to be set at too low a level, emissions will be excessive. Of course the tax could be raised, but this might turn out to be politically challenging. A tax increase would incur the wrath of the fossil fuel lobby and would be tough to pull off. If the tax is initially too high, environmentalists will be happy, but industry would be livid and lobby intensively to push it down, opening up the potential for a downward tax adjustment getting out of hand. Altering a tax once it is set would be politically messy.

Cap and trade has its own unfortunate political realities. If the U.S. Clean Energy Act now before the Senate passes and becomes law with cap and trade in place, many carbon allowances will be given away. Environmentalists hate the idea of coal-fired utilities getting free allowances. I suspect that if Congress were currently negotiating a carbon tax instead of a cap, huge giveaways of tax revenues to utilities and others would occur just as it has for carbon allowances. It’s ugly, but to get unhooked from fossil fuels and to move to a clean energy path under a democracy will require buying the political support of entrenched interests. This is the truth of interest group politics in a democracy. In essence, the fossil fuel industry will have to be bribed to go away no matter whether we adopt a carbon tax or cap and trade.

The biggest political advantage of cap and trade is that it is not a tax in the ordinary sense of the term. Taxes in this country are politically a tough sell. Cap and trade indeed results in a price being placed on carbon much in the same way a tax would—the right wing critics of cap and trade are right about this—but it is a price, not a tax. The real economic virtue of cap and trade is that we know we are getting a specific cap on emissions. We don’t know exactly what we would get from a tax. With caps in place, the political struggle will be done with. Establishing an adjustable tax could be just the beginning of a never-ending battle over its magnitude.

Perhaps our attitude toward taxes will change in the future. We could fund our government and reduce government deficits by taxing bad things, such as carbon emissions, instead of good things, such as earning income from work. The French government recently signed a carbon tax into law, but ran afoul of constitutional problems over exemptions of polluting industries. French President Sarkozy believes that his government will ultimately approve a revised carbon tax law that will pass constitutional muster. Unlike the U.S., the French get most of their electricity from carbon-free nuclear plants, eliminating a significant source of political opposition to a carbon tax.

Environmentalists versus Ecologists on Carbon Offsets: A Path to Reconciliation

2009-12-10T09:30:00.000-08:00

Environmentalists (Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth staffers in particular) increasingly harbor deep suspicions about the idea of carbon offsets as part of a system of emissions allowance trading. Under such a scheme, an electric utility that burns coal would be required to purchase or otherwise acquire allowances to cover its CO2 emissions. In each year the government would auction off or give away allowances equal to a fixed and declining annual cap. If offsets were allowed, then a utility could substitute offsets for allowances. Offsets would be created by a certified source that carries out some action causing a reduction of atmospheric carbon. Offsets are a potential problem because their creators might get credit for greenhouse gas reductions they don’t really undertake. An example would be a landowner who initially reduced carbon stored in wood fiber through timber harvests but then later gets offset credits for sequestering carbon in newly planted trees. A utility that acquired such offsets and substitutes them for allowances would in effect defeat the goal of a shrinking emissions cap by continuing to emit carbon without in truth offsetting it through real additions to stored carbon.

To the consternation of wary environmentalists, conservation ecologists find the idea of offsets appealing because certain landscapes, such as grasslands and forests, accumulate carbon and offsets would provide landowners a way to earn income for conserving their property instead of exploiting it. For the details of how offsets could help expand grassland and old-growth forest habitats in this country, take a look at the earlier postings "The Ecology of Grass" and "Letting Forests Grow Old". The point is simple—two environmental problems can be killed with one stone through offsets—carbon can be sequestered and natural habitats protected. On top of habitat protection, rural communities would benefit from economic reinvigoration doing the work of carbon sequestration. Converting corn lands to grass, sequestering carbon, and raising grass-fed beef through intensive pasture management would do much to create employment in declining farm communities. Similarly, doing the work of forest restoration needed to let forests grow old and accumulate carbon could create significant amounts of rural employment in timber-dependent communities in the western U.S.

Let me comment on two possible options that could be followed in the cap and trade bill that would go some way toward reconciling environmentalists and ecologists. The first insures a scrupulous external certification for offset projects and the second places offsets outside the existing cap.

The experience with forest certification suggests that a rigorous approach to verifying carbon sequestration is distinctly possible. The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) was founded in 1994 by a broad array of environmental groups, forest products industry interests, and others for the purpose of improving forest management practices globally and bringing into reality the notion of environmentally sustainable forestry. The FSC pursues this ambitious goal by certifying forests around the world as being managed in an “ecologically, socially, and economically exemplary” fashion. The products of these forests can then by sold as FSC certified to customers who desire environmentally friendly products and are willing to pay for them. The ultimate benefit for forest landowners is the receipt of a price premium for certified harvested wood.

A list of core principles drives the certification process and includes compliance with all valid local laws and international agreements; assurance of clear tenure rights; protection of the rights and interests of local community members, workers, and indigenous peoples; efficient delivery of a wide range of economic, social, and environmental benefits from forests; and the protection and enhancement of biological diversity and ecological functioning in forests. The FSC has developed customized standards that fit local forest conditions around the world, including a set that applies to the old-growth forest of the Pacific Northwest. These particular standards call for not only the protection existing old growth, but its long-term expansion by letting some timber stands age and take on old-growth characteristics. To get certification, a Pacific Northwest forest landowner must keep a specified portion of trees under management in old growth or in stands that will become old growth. The essential idea behind certification is to encourage the human use of forests, but to accomplish such use in a manner that is at once ecologically sustainable and protective of all native forest species. This does not mean that big, old trees would all be put away in a natural museum and never harvested. It simply means that the amount of old-growth in the aggregate will be brought up to a level that will conserve the sum total of forest-based biological riches over the long haul. Big, old trees with their fine grain woods can be harvested, but only if they get replaced by growing other big, old trees.

FSC certification around the world now includes roughly 100 million hectares—an amazing accomplishment in such a short period of time. But clearly more needs to be done. One path to increasing certified forests in the U.S. and elsewhere is to combine the whole certification process with marketable carbon emission allowance trading. FSC-certified forest landowners could sell carbon emission allowances created by simply letting their forests age and accumulated carbon-laden biomass. In order to participate in carbon allowance markets in this fashion, forests would have to be certified by the FSC or other equivalent organizations, and would be monitored not for just forest management practices, but also for carbon accumulation. (In a blog posting, Trevor Herriot suggests a comparable Grassland Stewardship Council for certifying sustainable grassland management, http://trevorherriot.blogspot.com/2009/09/proposal-grassland-stewardship-council.html.)

By all appearances, the American Clean Energy and Security Act (the cap and trade bill passed by the House and now before the Senate) as currently written establishes a thorough review process for insuring the legitimacy of offset credits that can be used in lieu of emission allowances. The standards used in this process will be overseen by an Offsets Integrity Advisory Board. The process requires an accredited third party verification to assure that applicants for offsets have actually sequestered additional carbon equivalents in the amount claimed. Because the greatest opportunities for offsets reside in the world’s forests and because of its extensive experience in forest certification, the Forest Stewardship Council can and should play a major role in the verification of offsets both domestically and internationally. Given the FSC’s stellar reputation, critics would be assured that offsets are real and not faked in any way. The standards established for international deforestation reduction offsets in the cap and trade bill read exactly like those followed by the FSC in its current certification work including the “following of widely accepted, environmentally sustainable forest management practices,” the restoration of “native forest species and ecosystems,” and “due regard to the rights and interests of local communities, indigenous peoples, forest-dependent communities, and vulnerable social groups.” Achieving multiple environmental and social goals at the same time we sequester significant amounts of carbon seems like too good a deal to pass up. The devil is in the details of this approach, but then again he always is no matter what one does.

Another more radical option is to remove offsets from the cap and fund them with allowance auction revenues. The House cap and trade legislation as currently written allows for up to 2 billion tons of carbon equivalent offsets annually to be used instead of government issued allowances to satisfy emission requirements under the cap. As the cap shrinks from its peak of 5.4 billion tons of carbon equivalents in 2016 down to roughly 1 billion tons in 2050 and beyond, offsets will loom larger as a proportion of the cap. Instead of such a heavy dependence on offsets, the legislation could be rewritten so that the cap is fully satisfied by allowances and that a portion of emission allowance auction revenues is allocated to offset purchases, perhaps a fifth. If the existing annual caps in the House bill are retained and legitimate offsets are funded from allowance revenues, the volume of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere would shrink at a more rapid rate than otherwise while gaining the ecological and social benefits of an offsets program. This approach would also assure attainment of the cap irrespective of the actual performance of offsets projects, alleviating the concerns of wary environmentalists.

Feeding the World and Compact Green Living

2009-11-16T08:00:00.000-08:00

While the focus of our attention in these posts is on the U.S. and by inference comparable affluent countries of the world, I would like to direct the reader to a recent fascinating study about the feasibility of feeding a global population of more than 9 billion in 2050 using environmentally friendly “organic” crops and moving away from confined animal feeding toward more humane free range approaches. The study dispels the usual claim that organic agriculture is fine for the affluent, but we need high-technology fertilizer and pesticide based cropping systems along with confined animal feeding operations to provide the world’s population including the poor with a healthy amount of calories and proteins.

The starting point for the study is the Food and Agricultural Organization’s (FAO) projections for 2050 agricultural production and land use. A “business as usual” forecast yields a 9 percent cropland expansion relative to 2000 and an increase in crop yields per unit land of around 54 percent. Production rises in the future according to these projections primarily because of growth in agricultural yields as opposed to more expansive land cultivation. A review of the literature on organic agriculture suggests crop yields somewhat below conventional agriculture, but less so in developing countries where organic agriculture possesses a substantial potential to improve soil fertility and productivity. Organic crop yields are close enough to conventional agriculture to support healthy global diets for all in 2050 under expected trends. The study considers three methods of raising livestock for protein: intensive, humane, and organic. To allow animals to range freely (the humane option) requires 10 percent more feed input than confined feeding (the intensive option), and to adopt organic standards costs 20 percent more in feed than the intensive option. The study concludes that organic agriculture can likely feed a projected global population of 9.2 billion in 2050 without increasing land under cultivation by more than the 9 percent projected by the FAO. This added cropland can come out of the huge inventory now devoted to grazing globally while at the same time expanding free-range meat productivity through more intensive pasture management. The essential cost for us in U.S. and some of the other affluent countries of the world to accomplish all this will be a need to reduce our caloric and protein intake to lower, healthier levels, such as those in the French diet. Judging from the gastronomical pleasures the French enjoy (as discussed earlier), this shouldn’t be too much of a problem. A huge environmental virtue of free-range animal husbandry and organic cropping would be a substantial reduction in greenhouse gases associated with our current fossil-fuel dependent agricultural system. On top of this, injections of excessive nitrogen from fertilizer runoff into our oceans that cause dead zones can be brought to a halt, and we can do this without the need to take away more of nature’s space. The study also suggests that roughly 15 percent of our current global energy consumption can come from agriculture (mostly wastes and perennial grasses such as switch grass) while still meeting global food supply needs.

All this means that compact living at a global level is eminently feasible. We can get by with the current amount of land we use for cropping and grazing worldwide even with an increase in population to 9 billion.

(The reference for the study is Karl-Heinz Erb et al., Eating the Planet: Feeding and Fuelling the World Sustainably, Fairly, and Humanely--a Scoping Study (Institute of Social Ecology and PIK Potsdam, 2009 [cited November 13, 2009]); available from http://www.ciwf.org.uk/includes/documents/cm_docs/2009/e/eating_the_planet_full_report_nov_2009.pdf.)

Compact Living in a Parisian Suburb

2009-11-05T07:02:00.000-08:00

Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines is a “new town” built on 7,000 hectares of land 20 kilometers west of Paris near Versailles. Having once served as an outdoor playground for the French aristocracy, the land on which the town sits retains a mix of beautiful woodlands and numerous ponds. The town as a whole includes seven different municipalities (communes) which add up in population to 147,000. The population density of the town equals 2,100 individuals per square kilometer which amounts to about 476 square meters per person, or more than twice the same figure for the Paris urbanized area as a whole. The fairly high density “streetcar” era suburb where I live, Shorewood, Wisconsin, has 301 square meters of land surface per resident, a modest amount by American standards (the average for 13 large urbanized areas in U.S. is 700 square meters per person). Saint Quentin on its face looks like a fairly low density, spread out suburb, not that much different from the American experience.

A closer look at the town’s spatial arrangement tells a somewhat different story. Within its boundaries, more than 40 percent of Saint Quentin’s surface area is devoted to woodlands, water, and other kinds of open space. In short, population density for the land in strictly urbanized use is more like 3,500 individuals per square kilometer yielding a per capita surface area of 285 square meters, somewhat less than what I get in my home suburb. Essentially, what Saint Quentin has done is retain much of its landscape in a natural condition and concentrate business and housing development at fairly high densities. This is confirmed in a tour around the town by the presence of significant numbers of three and four story multiunit residential buildings. The downtown pedestrian-only retail mall is also at fairly high density with 2-4 story structures surrounded by taller office buildings. Wherever one is in the town, woods and water are never very far away. The virtues of high density are gained without sacrificing access to green space. Many of the buildings are standard modernist architectural fare but have been designed on a human scale, and a number originated from some of France’s leading architects who have sometimes given their works here an eye-catching if controversial whimsical quality.

Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines is a product of France’s 1960s new town movement, an effort to solve critical social problems that became apparent in the wake of World War II—urban crowding and a housing shortage worsened by rapid population expansion in the Paris region. From the beginning, new towns were a product of central planning. As the story goes, Charles de Gaulle took his head urban planner, Paul Delouvrier, for a helicopter ride over the Paris area in 1961 and told him to bring a bit of order to all that they could see below. This is exactly what happened. A plan for the Paris region established La Défense just outside the city boundaries as the region’s second central business district and five new towns which were to absorb the bulk of the region’s population and employment growth. La Défense, with its high-rise glass office towers and its stark rectangular memorial arch, stands in sharp contrast to the classic beauty and human scale of historical Paris right next door. At the same time the five new towns were being developed, a regional passenger rail system, the RER, was constructed to connect them to the Paris area as a whole. On top of dealing with the effects of rapid population growth, part of the strategy for creating distinct concentrations of population and employment rather than a general spreading was to protect the green spaces in between. In the 1970s and 1980s, Saint Quentin grew rapidly and became a family oriented bastion of the French middle class with numerous young families, many of whom derive their income from employment in the professions or as managers. The town has attracted its share of high-tech employment, including Renault’s technology center.

Today in the U.S. members of the middle class see two distinct possibilities in choosing where to live. Either one can enjoy the rural ideal with its spacious living and close access to the countryside in the suburbs, or one can live according to an urban ideal and take pleasure in the cultural amenities ready at hand in a spatially compact central city. In Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines one appears to be able to satisfy both ideals simultaneously. Residents have access to both urban amenities that come with compact living and beautiful nearby rural open spaces within their “new town” boundaries.

Random Notes on a Recent Visit to Paris

2009-10-26T10:54:00.000-07:00

While sitting in a Paris cafe near Gare de Lyon, I noticed for the first time tasteful railings separating pedestrians from traffic along all exposed sidewalk edges. On the streets of Paris, or any other city, walkers want to feel safe from the threatening presence of speeding cars, trucks, and buses. A line of plane trees along the outer edge of the wide boulevard sidewalks in much of Paris add to this needed sense of security. Short blocks, numerous streets meeting at angular intersections, many cafes, and tasteful buildings limited to four or five stories made for an appealing streetscape, one that bustles with people.

Paris has its thorns. The Promenade Plantee is an old viaduct beginning at Place de la Bastille that has been transformed into a wonderful garden walk with a remarkable diversity of vegetation above and a series of expensive, artsy shops beneath. Just off the promenade down a flight of stairs toward Place d'Aligra is a small potentially attractive garden park that has been taken over by homeless Parisians and is now strewn with trash. The Place d’Aligra contains a shuttered, run-down daily market covered with graffiti. Still, the process of renewal seems to be underway as suggested by construction and renovation activity in the surrounding area as well as inside the old market itself. Although seedy, street life and local cafes around the square are busy.

At the other end of the wealth spectrum, hoards of boutiques have invaded the Marais district, one of Paris' last vestiges of medieval scale neighborhoods, kicking out boulangeries, cafes, and other businesses that make for a functional and interesting street life. The local Jewish community appears to be under siege from the inflow of money driving up local real estate prices.

Some would regard Paris as overly compact and crowded--my lovely wife for instance. I beg to differ given the beautiful open areas to which one can escape--Palais Royale, Place des Vosges, Luxembourg Gardens, Bois de Boulogne, and Bois de Vincennes, not to mention walkways along the River Seine. The French have a special facility for designing compact spaces. Yet I have to admit to getting irritated at times myself from the busyness of Paris.

There is the beauty of the bells of Notre Dame unexpectedly ringing out and drawing attention to twilight reflected on its facade. And there is the press of people in rush hour along boulevard St. Germaine causing one to wonder what their lives might be like—what projects (to use a Sartrian term) and passions they might have. The surprises that bring wonder in Paris are common—flowing fountains, statues, iconic faces molded in metal plaques on buildings and fences, small parks and flowering gardens, peaceful squares, and previously undiscovered cafes.

On a sunny Sunday afternoon those who can afford it sun themselves and show off there wealth and good taste at the outdoor tables of the Cafe de Flore, Sartre's wartime hangout--the cafe was able to get coal from the Italian cafe supply mafia and that was a place to get warm in winter and for Sartre to right his philosophical tomb, Being and Nothingness. Today only the pseudo-rich and affluent tourists can afford the place. Bohemian intellectuals who become famous can make a place fashionable and unintentionally transform it into something it originally was not. Artists did the same thing for Montmartre.

Pere Lachaise Cemetary speaks to death and the attempt to evade its permanence through conspicuous monuments. The Bastille Thursday market speaks to life and the enjoyment of its simplest and most enjoyable of pleasures--unadorned, fresh food.

La Défense, Paris' business center just to the west of the city boundary, causes one to take pause. How could the French allow the construction of such a huge collection of nondescript but alienating glass, steel, and concrete towers centered on a huge but artless arch next to the most beautiful city in the world?

St. Quentin-en-Yvelines is a "nouvelle ville” carved out of the countryside around an old pond southwest of Paris. This town is a product of French planning but fortunately La Défense it is not. The architecture is modern but of a human scale and even at times whimsical. The streets in the pedestrian-only commercial area are fairly intimate and reasonably well-stocked with trees and other vegetation. A good portion of the urban area remains devoted to small ponds and forest. The housing appears to be fairly dense although quite a bit less so than Paris proper. All-and-all it looks like a comfortable place to live.

Thomas Jefferson, Paris, and Urban vs. Rural Ideals

2009-09-15T07:10:00.001-07:00

Thomas Jefferson served as the U.S. minister to France from 1784 to 1789 and lived in Paris just off the Champs-Élysées at rue de Berri. Jefferson magnetically took to the Parisian life where his diverse capabilities and interests—statesman, philosopher, writer, musician, architect, horticulturalist, and connoisseur of fine wines and good food—could find satisfactions impossible to achieve in full at his isolated Monticello much less anywhere else in Virginia or the rest of the colonies. Despite France's recent defeat in the Seven Years War at the hands of the British and undercurrents of political unrest, Paris of the 1780s was the center of the European cultural universe. At the time of Jefferson’s arrival, a building boom was underway made evident by construction cranes punctuating the cityscape. After living a year in relatively cramped quarters, Jefferson moved to the more spacious, newly finished Hôtel de Langeac with its eye-catching neoclassical façade on rue de Berri where he could entertain with Virginia graciousness, accumulate furnishings, works of art, and books for his voluminous library, and design and plant a large garden to his liking including vegetables from home. Jefferson took time to explore the gardens of Paris, looking for ideas and plants he could bring to his new plot and eventually his beloved Monticello. He traveled to southern France a number of times where he collected the best wines for his Paris table and root stocks for later experimentation in growing grapes back in Virginia. On these trips he enthusiastically explored Roman ruins and other architectural treasures in the French countryside. Of course Paris itself was filled with architectural gems that influenced Jefferson’s thinking later on the design of the new capitol at Washington.

Jefferson quickly integrated himself into the cultural, intellectual, and political life of Paris. He attended concerts, operas, and art exhibitions, became a part of Paris’s salon culture, and partook of the café and street life, especially in the infamous Palais Royale where all of Paris’s social classes mixed, licentious behavior ran rampant, and revolutionary sentiments fermented. Jefferson found appalling the condition of the lower classes in France and clearly sympathized with their plight and agreed with their desires for more democracy. His own family values conflicted with the unbridled promiscuity he observed in Parisian society, especially within the aristocratic class (I leave it to others to judge Jefferson’s own behavior in his apparent affair with one his slaves, Sally Hemings). He invited the best scientific, artistic, and political minds of the day to his own home for intimate dinners at a well appointed table with the best wines money could buy. He especially enjoyed the company of the mathematical genius, marquis de Condorcet, who shared a love of the classics and the ideals of Republicanism and human equality with Jefferson. Later Condorcet, a leader in the revolution, apparently took his own life when political forces turned against him and he was declared a traitor.

As the American minister to the court of France, Jefferson pursued the vocation of diplomacy with special skill despite his low rank in the core of diplomats who pressed for the attention of the King, Louis the XVI. Jefferson believed in his heart that democracy in his own country would be solidified by a prosperous agricultural economy composed of individual farm proprietors who owned their own land and possessed a commitment to democracy and republican government as a matter of self interest. Rather than pushing for the development of a manufacturing economy through protective measures, Jefferson pressed for open trade that would expand markets for his country’s exports, especially tobacco, rice, and whale oil. In these efforts he met with mixed success. The French crown depended for its finances upon the taxing of all commodities entering the gates of Paris which were collected by private tax collectors known as the farmers-general. This group had given a monopoly in the tobacco trade to American financier, Robert Morris. Jefferson succeeded in weakening, but could not entirely break, Morris’s hold on the tobacco trade, but Jefferson did convince the crown to exclude British whale oil from the lucrative French market where demand for the oil grew in proportion to the popularity of public lighting installed to reduce Parisian street crime.

With political unrest in Paris intensifying daily, Jefferson left in the fall of 1789 for a six month leave back in Virginia to settle his daughters, check on Monticello, and negotiate with his creditors over his ever-accumulating debts further expanded by five years of lavish spending in Paris. He intended to return to his post in the city, but never did. The thirty-eight pieces of luggage and crates he shipped back to Virginia, along with a carriage and a phaeton, contained paintings, busts, clocks, a harpsichord, and books for Jefferson’s ballooning library. On top of this was an assortment of plants, including a white fig and two cork oak trees, as well as food stuffs unavailable in Virginia such as macaroni, Parmesan cheese, dates, olive oil, and tea as well as a selection of French wines. Jefferson never shied away from spending on those things he loved and took advantage of the extensive opportunities for doing so in the well-stocked Parisian markets.

Jefferson left Paris in an optimistic frame of mind about the ability of the French to carry out a peaceful revolution and institute a republic form of government with guarantees for basic human rights. About this he couldn’t have been more wrong. Many of his closest friends in France ultimately lost there lives in the tumult that soon followed. Jefferson was certainly aware of the deep fissures in French society between rulers and ruled, but he seemed to have little inkling of the deep desire for bloody revenge by the rural an urban poor. He sympathized deeply with the poverty of the peasantry he saw on his travels outside of Paris, but not so much with the degraded condition of the urban proletariat he observed daily in Paris. To Jefferson, the later were a violent and uncouth rabble prone to destructive rebellions that upset the civility of his Parisian routines. Despite his obvious relish for the life of a Parisian bourgeois, he never consciously changed his mind about cities. For Jefferson, “The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.” Jefferson loved his own life in the city, but found highly distasteful and threatening what the city did to the lower classes.

Jefferson’s political vision for his own country took for it's inspiration the property rights theory of John Locke. Whoever improves the land and embodies labor in it has a natural right to its ownership, according to Locke. Jefferson eagerly agreed with Locke that land-owning yeoman farmers will have an abiding interest in a government whose essential purpose is to protect individual rights. Accordingly, Jefferson tells us that “Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens…the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bands.” In short, rural land owners have a deeper stake in a well functioning government than would an urban industrial proletariat. For this reason, Jefferson discouraged the development of city-based industry in the U.S. and emphasized rural expansion and settlement by independent farmers.

Jefferson perfectly embodies the contradictory attitudes about the comparative virtue of city and rural life that we Americans hold to this very day. We love wide open country spaces and the privacy that goes with them, yet we enjoy close proximity to like-minded others and to cultural and economic institutions that thrive in a compact, populace environment. Cities that we find to be exciting and energizing, we also see as repulsive for their congestion, poverty, corruption, violence, and dirt. We enjoy the quiet of the country and the beauty of its natural setting, but living in it risks boredom. Jefferson himself relished Monticello and busied himself with a multitude of construction projects and experimentations in cultivation, but his diverse cultural interests yearned for Parisian cosmopolitanism and consumer riches. Yet in the end he came down philosophically on the side of the rural life.

The single most consequential legislative manifestation of Jefferson’s philosophy did not come until the presidency of Abraham Lincoln with the passage of the Homestead Act in 1862. The Act granted to anyone who had never taken up arms against the United States 160 acres of undeveloped land outside the original thirteen colonies. To obtain full ownership, an applicant needed to first file a claim on a specific parcel with the local land office, live on the land and undertake improvements, and file for a deed of title. Advocates for the Act anticipated that it would vastly expand the class of “Jeffersonian” smallholders in this country who could serve as the backbone of its democratic institutions. Escaping European political oppression and economic exploitation, most immigrants came to this country with the special hope of obtaining free land. For some states, such as Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Kansas where 160 acres proved to be a sufficient amount of land for prosperous farming, the Act turned out to be a boon to immigrant settlement. But for western dry landscapes beyond the 100th meridian, 160 acres was just not enough to provide the most basic sustenance to an immigrant family. Many attempted to eke out a living on their homesteads across the Great Plains and succeeded for a time in wet years, but droughts endemic to the region eventually hit, and many settlers had to move on. Legendary abuses of the Homestead Act in great swaths of the West put land in the hands of large cattle barons who used fraudulent acquisitions to enclose important water resources. Similar abuses in the forested northwest caused much land to end up in the hands of large timber companies. In short, most immigrants failed in their quest for landownership and ended up in the burgeoning, densely packed industrial cities of the Eastern and Midwestern U.S. By the end of the Nineteenth Century, 66 percent of the foreign born lived in cities in comparison to 36 percent of the native population. Many, if not most, immigrants were precluded from realizing dreams they might have had of becoming rural landholders.

Industrialization caused a substantial majority of immigrants to find their material mode of life in the city, not the country. At the end of the Nineteenth century, factories with their puffing smoke stacks—a mark of civic pride judging from old posters—crowded around ports and rail lines to cheapen shipping costs and to have ready access to large pools of labor who settled in densely packed neighborhoods nearby. Transportation costs on ships and trains between cities were comparatively cheap, but to move goods around within cities by wagon was quite expensive—hence the reason for crowding industrial operations around railheads and docks. Economic reality trumped the Jeffersonian ideal for immigrants and natives alike, although the rural dream in itself remained alive. The upper and middle classes in cities like Boston aspired to the life of the English country aristocrat who owned a house in London from which to enjoy urban culture and conduct business and political affairs (as Jefferson had in Paris) but also possessed a rural estate to retreat to for rest, reflection, and enjoyment of the great outdoors. In response to such aspirations, members of the Bostonian elite often bought country cottages to which they could escape on the weekends. Many immigrants looked with nostalgia back to their own rural heritage, remembering the beauty of the green hills and woods they left behind, but forgetting about the poverty and oppression that drove them away. An idealized vision of rural life cut across class lines despite its differing origins.

Before the arrival of the streetcar, except for the very rich who owned carriages, everyone lived compactly in cities because of the need to walk everywhere. This limited the extent of human interaction roughly to a radius of what one could walk in an hour, roughly three miles. The old pedestrian city of Boston extended outward to a maximum of about two and one half miles from city hall. Despite the availability of vacant land, little development could be found beyond this boundary. At first only the wealthy could totally escape the unpleasant conditions of the industrialization-induced factory districts and tenements by taking advantage of the costly but convenient new steam railroad lines that would take them to spacious dwellings in nearby country towns where what Sam Bass Warner calls the “rural ideal” could be realized. In such locales, one could enjoy the pleasures of family life, the security of a small community, and the presence natural surroundings nearby.

Space was essential to the pleasures of rural life sought by Boston’s urban elite as it is today in our own quest for the suburban dream. The “rural ideal” historically and for us today includes the values of family, community, and beautiful landscapes, all of which require space. The enjoyment of family interactions relies on ample private in and around the home; the security of a small community implies a protective barrier of space from threatening others and a shared space with those one trusts; and access to rural and natural landscapes infers the presence of undeveloped land nearby. Most of all space is wanted for its own sake. When given the opportunity we willingly purchase larger domiciles on more spacious lots with a greater margin of distance from our neighbors. Space counts as a part of our vision of the good life today as it did more than a hundred years ago.

The requirement for compactness in mid-nineteenth Century urban life for all but the wealthiest was fundamentally economic. Industrial enterprises needed to be near ports and railheads to keep the cost of moving goods around low, and working class tenements needed to be near the industrial districts so workers could get to them on foot. Because business communication was either face-to-face or by hand-delivered documents, managerial and office functions and other commercial activities had to abut the industrial districts, and to be close to their customers, retail enterprises located nearby. Compactness was a matter of economic necessity, but it added to life’s unpleasantness—smoke from factories, noise, smells from waste and sewage, congestion on crowded streets. No wonder that Boston’s elite wanted to escape to the country.

The coming of the horse-pulled streetcar and later the much faster electric trolley removed constraints on space inherent in the early industrial city. On the electric trolley, one could cover six or more miles in an hour’s time. This meant that the distance between work and home could now be stretched out. With trolley lines running outward beyond the old city limits, houses could from this moment on be constructed beyond the old city boundaries and successfully marketed to middle class families who could afford the trolley. By the end of the Century, the limits of development around Boston pushed outward from a two-plus mile radius to ten miles from the center. Roughly half of Boston’s population, including wealthy merchants and professionals at the high end of the income distribution on down to well paid artisans and skilled craftworkers could now move further out into more spacious dwellings. Soon a spatial class hierarchy emerged with the wealthiest living furthest from the center, middle income households closer in, and the poorest paid occupying the old housing nearest the urban center. The later couldn’t afford trolley fare and walked to work while the rest took advantage of the trolley for getting around the city. Those who moved outward increased the spaciousness and quality of their dwellings, and those who arrived first on the urban edge enjoyed all elements of the rural idea including undisturbed open space before the rest of the city caught up to them. The wealthiest furthest out came closest to a permanent realization of a quasi-rural style of life through a mix of careful landscaping and proximity to the countryside beyond the urban edge. Those who moved outward but failed in their quest for access to natural landscapes on the urban edge nonetheless gained in space, quietness, cleanliness, and the security of neighborhood social homogeneity.

From the turn of the center on, the quality of life in cities improved regardless of the middle class’s outward flight. Progressives pushed for more parks, improvements in water supply and sewage disposal, better sanitation, street paving, greater attention to public health, smoke controls, building codes and zoning, and, perhaps most important of all, more green space and parks. Cities throughout the country put in place expansive park systems, many of which were designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, the architect of New York City’s famous Central Park. In the early twentieth century American city, to shop in the best department stores, use a major library, attend an opera, visit a museum, see the latest musical, or get a great restaurant meal, one needed to travel downtown. Such experiences were largely unavailable in the suburbs. The virtues of compactness Jefferson found in eighteenth century Paris began to surface in the American city.

Despite improving cities, Americans at the midpoint of the Twentieth Century held in their hearts a version of the Jeffersonian rural ideal—detached spacious homes on large plots of land, local community control of municipal government, neighbors like oneself, and expansive green landscapes. The subsequent suburban boom proves this point, but before we tackle this issue, we need to recognize that lurking deeper in the American and European culture is another vision of space, one that Jefferson discovered in his Parisian experience. This could be described as an “urban ideal”—access to society’s defining public institutions and spaces and proximity to cultural, social, and economic opportunities available only where populations achieve a minimum scale.

Jane Jacobs elaborates this “urban ideal” in her classic work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Here she postulates the following: (1) populations in successful city neighborhoods should be dense enough to support a diversity of activities and functions such as residences, shops, restaurants, offices, and theaters; (2) blocks should be short so one can take varied routes from one point to another; and (3) buildings should be varied in age and size to support a diversity of functions and provide visual interest. Jacobs’ notion of an urban ideal takes a neighborhood focus and boils down to the following: high population densities, diversity of economic and cultural functions, and a pedestrian-friendly scale in streets, buildings, and public spaces. Where this ideal is realized, streets will be busy all day with varied and interesting traffic. With people coming out for shopping in the morning or coming to work in local offices, heading to a café for lunch at noon, and enjoying a night out at a local theater, streets will be busy from dawn to bedtime. All this human presence means that streets will feel secure and safe—someone will no doubt always be watching the local comings and goings.

The one element of urban life given short shrift by Jacobs, but certainly noticed in Paris by Jefferson, who especially enjoyed wandering through the city’s gardens and nearby wooded landscapes, is access to green open spaces. While Jacobs advocates powerfully for socially attractive cities, we need to turn to the work of landscape architect Ian McHarg to find the idea of access to nature as an essential part of urban life. McHarg recognizes that urban settings are fundamentally cultural artifacts, but points to numerous cities able to take advantage of their natural landscapes, such as their watersheds, marshes, steep slopes, and woodlands, to retain elements of nature within urban boundaries. For McHarg, “The problem of man and nature is not one of providing decorative background for human play, or even ameliorating the grim city: it is the necessity of sustaining nature as a source of life, milieu, teacher, sanctum, challenge, and most of all, of rediscovery of nature’s corollary of the unknown in the self, the source of meaning.” Add McHarg’s vision of nature in the city to the urban visions of Jefferson and Jacobs, and we have a complete “urban ideal”—high population density; multiple economic, social, and cultural functions; significant public spaces and institutions; pedestrian friendly scale; and green and natural landscapes within city boundaries. Americans at the last mid-century could have chosen to pursuit an “urban ideal” in their cities, but chose instead to vacate those cities in favor of the rural lands beyond.

Grassland Birds and Grass-Fed Beef: Trevor Herriot

2009-09-10T06:21:00.000-07:00

For a view from Canada of threatened grasslands and prospects for their renewal, I urge you to take a look at Trevor Herriot's blog and new book, Grass, Sky, and Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds. Here is a recent post from his blog, http://trevorherriot.blogspot.com/:

Last week, I began to describe the industrial model that ultimately determines how grassland is used—controlling the prices and marketing that in turn limit the viable options for farmers and ranchers. (Anyone interested in a more detailed critique of this system would do well to read the National Farmer Union’s document entitled “The Farm Crisis and the Cattle Sector: Toward a New Analysis and New Solutions”) (Cathy Holtslander of Beyond Factory Farming put me onto this report.)

I believe we might be able to help producers choose practices that are good for the ecology of grassland and its native plants and animals by in turn giving consumers more choices. Easy to say; not so easy to do.

As things are, in most of Canada if you want to buy grass-finished beef or beef from cattle that graze on well-maintained native pasture or on tame grass managed with Holistic Management principles you pretty well have to buy it directly from the producer. There are good reasons to buy directly from the farm or ranch and I do it myself all the time, but if you talk to most of these men and women they will tell you that the majority of the animals they raise end up going into the system, which means they are sold to feedlots and corporate slaughter and processing facilities. All the good work they do in raising animals in an ecologically sound manner, in producing beef that is high in Omega-3 fatty acids, in sustaining grassland habitat, is in a sense lost within the system. The health benefits of a grass-fed animal are entirely lost after a few weeks in the feedlot eating grain, growth hormones and anti-biotics. And once the meat gets to the store as steak, roast, or hamburger, there is no way to distinguish it from beef raised by someone who has not made the effort to conserve habitat, and who in fact may be destroying riparian areas, following poor grazing practices, and ploughing native grass to seed it to crested wheatgrass.

Many beef producers are following excellent stewardship practices, but others are not. If there was a way for consumers to distinguish between the two, their choices at the supermarket would benefit those who are following best practices and provide others with an incentive to improve.

In my next posting, I will look at how the forestry industry in Canada has dealt with a similar situation.

Letting Forests Grow Old: Saving Biodiversity and Absorbing Carbon through Compact Green Forestry

2009-09-08T08:43:00.000-07:00

Settlers arriving at the end of the Oregon Trail in the 1840s and 1850s quickly filled up the Willamette Valley, a grassland that had been kept free of trees because of fires set by Indians to attract game to fresh grasses for easy hunting. Much of the rest of western Oregon and Washington were covered with thick forests of huge trees at which settlers and lumberjacks alike marveled, some as much as 10 feet in diameter and 400 feet in height. Settlers wanted agricultural land not trees, but forests were all that was left. They tried the laborious process of clearing away the trees, but were usually rewarded with cropland of little value. Some were able to supplement their income by selling timber where there was a market for it near emerging urban centers, such as Portland and Seattle. The Donation Land Act of 1850 that allowed a settler to claim 320 acres, or 640 acres for husband and wife, failed to create a Jeffersonian paradise of small yeoman farmers in the Pacific Northwest.

The way to make money at this point in the history of the Northwest was to harvest timber, mill it into lumber, and ship it off to the booming gold fields of California, and this is what the early lumber barons did. Rather than the family farm, the basis of the region's economy became the lumber camp with its army of lumberjacks, the mill, and the port for loading and shipping lumber. Later with the arrival of the railroad, and a new class of timber barons such as Frederick Weyerhaeuser, the orientation of the market shifted to feeding the booming urban markets of the East. Within a century, the vast old-growth forests were reduced to a shadow of their former selves.

Foresters of the old school viewed old-growth as something to be cut down. Mature Douglas-fir forests contain a huge amount of biomass, more on a per hectare basis than any other plant species in the world. Mild, wet winters and warm dry summers provide ideal conditions for a conifer—a tree that doesn’t loose its leaves in the winter—to accumulate a huge amount of woody material. The tree can photosynthesize the sun’s energy year around. Douglas fir will live up to 750 years, obtaining a height of up to 100 meters (300 plus feet) and a diameter of 2 meters (6 plus feet) or more. Once a Douglas-fir crashes to the floor from old age, chances are it won’t be replaced by one of its own kind because its seedlings don’t survive in the deep shade of old-growth forests. More than likely a shade tolerant tree, such as the western hemlock, will pop up into the canopy and replace the Douglas-fir. If a forest is struck by a massive blow-down, or better yet a fire, then Douglas-fir seedlings will emerge in the open sun and grow rapidly, creating a thick forest that will eventually prune itself with a few large trees surviving.

The trouble with an old-growth Douglas fir from a forester’s perspective is its failure to add woody biomass once it reaches maturity. Forests, like people, grow in their youth but stop adding biomass in old age. A mature tree gains branch growth in its sunny upper canopy, but sheds branches in its shady lower reaches. After roughly a hundred years of age, the net addition to woody material in a Douglas fir slows dramatically. While an old-growth Douglas-fir forest (200 plus years of age) contains a huge amount of biomass, it doesn’t add any. Conversely a young Douglas-fir forest adds biomass at an exceptionally high rate. The economic logic of forest exploitation in such circumstances is simple—clear-cut remaining old-growth, replant it with seedlings, let it grow 75-100 years, and cut it again. This amounts to converting a natural forest to a plantation. Forestry becomes tree farming.

Today foresters recognize the ecological virtues of old-growth ignored by the older logic of exploitation. The pioneering research of Jerry Franklin, a forestry professor, and his colleagues established the ecological significance of Pacific Northwest old-growth forests. Old-growth forests possess special biological features lacking in their younger counterparts starting with really big trees that perform a host of ecological functions and provide habitat for a multitude of species. By intercepting fogs and mists in their huge canopies, old-growth forests add substantially to local terrestrial water supplies. Lichens love to hang from the upper branches of the canopy, suck up still more moisture, and fix nitrogen that adds to the nutrient base of the forest as a whole. The same canopies take on an irregular shape that causes spotty light flows to the forest floor and a patchiness and diversity to understory vegetation. An absence of much light at all beneath densely packed young stands of Douglas fir excludes understory vegetation in such forests and reduces biodiversity. Age in forests reduces growth but supports much greater species diversity than youth. Large old trees with their big tall trunks and diverse climate niches, beginning with the cool, quiet, damp forest floor and ending at the top with crowns often broken up from exposure to the elements, provide all sorts of potential homes for a variety of species. The irregularities of the crown attracts rare nesting Spotted Owls and perches for Bald Eagles watching nearby waterways for prey. An abundance of insects find their home on and in the bark of big, old trees and serve as a source of food for a variety of birds and mammals, including bats that feed on flying insects above the crown. As many as 1,500 species of invertebrate insects can be found in, on, and around a large, old-growth Douglas fir.

The special role that big trees play in old-growth forests don’t end with tree death. Large, dead snags become feeding grounds for all sorts of bacteria, fungi, and insects. Most important of all, snags become the home of cavity-excavating birds such as the Pileated Woodpecker and other birds that move in after woodpeckers move on. Once the snags come crashing down, they still have work to do as habitat for a variety of organisms. Fallen logs turn out to be an important nursery for tree seedlings that have trouble competing with ground-layer plants, and provide a path into open areas for small mammals that eat fungi and inject spore laden feces near seedlings. The spores grow to become fungi which form a symbiotic relationship with new tree roots and help accelerate reforestation.

Some snags end up falling into streams to the benefit of juvenile salmon who hang out in the resulting pools, waiting for prey to float by. Adult salmon roam the Pacific in search of food until the time for reproducing arrives. They then return to the forest stream of their birth, and find a gravel bed where the females can lay their eggs and the males fertilize them. Adults with their energy spent from the long and perilous trip die and add what remains of their biomass to the local forest ecosystem. The cycle is completed once the juvenile salmon head out to sea.

In the ordinary timber harvesting cycle, the biological riches that old-growth forests support are lost to the economic desire for the vigor of youth. Income from creating woody biomass achieves a maximum by keep forests in a young, high-growth state. Conservationists have responded by advocating for the placement of old growth in a protected status, such as designated wilderness, to keep it out of the hands of the forest products industry. The trouble with this solution is the insufficient amount of forests around the country that contain big, old trees. If we care about preventing species that depend on old growth from heading down the path to extinction, we could use more old-growth forests. This can be accomplished by simply letting some of our young forests grow old. In the age of global warming, a key benefit of doing so is carbon sequestration. As young forests grow old, they add carbon rich biomass to trunk, branches, roots, and soil.

Let’s now consider how to pull off letting forests age more and accumulate carbon while extracting from them a reasonable flow of wood fiber for human use.

The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) was founded in 1994 by a broad array of environmental groups, forest products industry interests, and others to improve forest management practices globally and bring into reality the notion of environmentally sustainable forestry. The FSC pursues this ambitious goal by certifying forests around the world as being managed in an “ecologically, socially, and economically exemplary” fashion. The products of these forests can then by sold as FSC certified to customers who desire environmentally friendly products and are willing to pay for them. The ultimate benefit for forest landowners is the receipt of a price premium for certified wood. The LEED building certification process we discussed earlier awards points to developers who use FSC approved forest products in their buildings.

A list of core principles drives the certification process and includes compliance with all valid local laws and international agreements; assurance of clear tenure rights; protection of the rights and interests of local community members, workers, and indigenous peoples; efficient delivery of a wide range of economic, social, and environmental benefits from forests; and the protection and enhancement of biological diversity and ecological functioning in forests. The FSC has developed customized standards that fit local forest conditions around the world, including a set that applies to the old-growth forest of the Pacific Northwest. These particular standards call for not only the protection existing old growth, but its long-term expansion by letting some timber stands age and take on old-growth characteristics. To get certification, a Pacific Northwest forest landowner must keep a specified portion of trees under management in old growth or in stands that will become old growth as they age. The essential idea behind certification is to encourage the human use of forests, but to accomplish such use in a manner that is at once ecologically sustainable and protective of all native forest species. This does not mean that big, old trees would all be put away in a natural museum and never harvested. It simply means that the amount of old-growth in the aggregate will be brought up to a level that will conserve total forest-based biological riches over the long haul. Big, old trees with their fine grain woods can be harvested, but only if they get replaced by growing other big, old trees.

FSC certification around the world now includes roughly 100 million hectares—an amazing accomplishment in such a short time, but more needs to be done. One path to increasing certified forests in the U.S. and elsewhere is to combine the whole certification process with marketable carbon emission allowance trading. FSC-certified forest landowners could sell carbon emission allowances created by simply letting their forests age and accumulated carbon-laden biomass. To participate in carbon allowance markets in this fashion, forests would have to be certified by the FSC or other equivalent organizations, and would be monitored not for just forest management practices, but also for carbon accumulation. To get paid for accumulating carbon, you would have to be certified.

Forests suck up carbon by simply growing, but how much? The current average for all our forests is about 3.2 tons per hectare (1.3 tons per acre) and sums up to roughly 1,000 million metric tons a year. Forests clearly possess a substantial ability to absorb carbon. How much added carbon dioxide can be soaked up by forests in a year on top of what’s already being done? This of course depends on the rewards available for doing so. A recent study suggests that the ability sell carbon allowances at $100 per ton for sequestration would yield roughly an added 500 million metric tons of CO2 reduction annually from forest landowners, or about 8 percent of our current fossil fuel related emissions. This would be accomplished by landowners through added planting of forests, increasing the amount of time between harvests, and the use of forest management practices that reduce carbon emissions from plant matter breakdown.

Harvesting of commercial Douglas-fir forests in the Pacific Northwest occurs roughly on a 60-year cycle. At harvest, a forest is clearcut and either replanted or allowed to grow back through natural reseeding. Carbon storage in the vegetation, the woody debris on the ground, and the soils just before harvest equals nearly a million metric tons CO2 per hectare for a typical 60-year old forest. A representative old-growth Douglas-fir forest (250 years plus) stores nearly 2.3 million metric tons CO2 per hectare, more than twice as much as its younger counterpart. A clearcut harvest removes carbon from the forest in the cut trees and accelerates the breakdown of carbon-rich debris on the forest floor. In the milling process, a significant portion of the harvested wood ends up as waste or being burned for fuel, causing the embodied carbon to find its way back into the atmosphere fairly quickly. Roughly 45 percent of the woody-carbon ends up being stored in building materials and other products.

The future of newly cut Douglas-fir forest can take two paths. One is to treat it like a tree farm and replant and cut trees every 60 years. The other is to let the forest grow old. After 250 years, the old-growth forest will have stored about 2.3 million metric tons CO2 per hectare, but the comparable tree farm will only have stored about 70 percent of that assuming generously a permanent 45 percent wood products storage rate for harvested carbon. In short, allowing forests to age will significantly accelerate carbon sequestration. While the additions of harvestable wood may slow fairly quickly in the aging process, because big, old trees are always shedding branches that decompose slowly and add to soil carbon, carbon stores continues to accumulate well into very old age for a Douglas-fir forest.

Whether a forest certification program combined with marketable carbon allowances would increase or decrease total wood fiber production cannot be easily predicted. If a forest landowner received credit for the CO2 permanently embodied both in harvested wood (40-45 percent) and the forest itself, harvests could go up if a landowner plants more land to trees because of the added income from carbon allowances. On the other hand, if landowners are required to devote more land to old growth for certification and adopt longer periods between timber harvests to accumulate more carbon, then harvests could actually drop, even if the total amount of land devoted to forests expands. This drop could be mitigated somewhat by selectively harvesting old-growth trees through low-impact methods using horses to drag trees out of the woods or lifting them out with helicopters. Since trees would grow back in gaps and harvested carbon would be partially embodies in wood products, the net impact on total carbon accumulation could actually be positive. Moderate selective harvesting could be undertaken without substantially altering the old-growth structure of a forest and its functionality as habitat. Still such moderate harvesting would not likely produce the volume of wood that could be produced from a comparable land base of 60-year rotation tree farms.

Forest productivity statistics suggest the presence of a fair amount of wiggle room for expanding harvests from younger forests to compensate for old-growth protection. Publicly owned timberland unreserved for habitat protection or any other purposes constitutes about 29 percent of all land in the U.S. potentially usable for timber harvesting. On this land, only about 20 percent of the total annual growth is harvested annually at present. After World War II, the public forests came under intense harvesting pressure to provide raw material for the housing boom. In recent years, these same forests have been in a recovery mode. Clearly there is plenty of room for harvest expansion on public lands in the future even if more old growth is protected. Non-industrial forests, those owned by individuals who don’t process wood for living, compose about 58 percent of the timberland in the U.S. and currently remove about 75 percent of their annual growth. Even with additional old growth protection, there is some room for sustainable expansion in harvests on these lands. Industrial forests, mostly tree plantations with young, planted, fast growing trees, currently harvest about 105 percent of annual growth. Plantation forests indirectly play a role in the protection of their natural counterparts by reducing harvesting pressure on the latter. Certification allows for plantation forestry so long as it is done in an environmentally sound manner and a portion of the certified land is sustained in natural forests including old growth. Plantations look a bit like row crop agriculture, but they do have a role to play in protecting forest ecosystems and if managed right they can accumulate carbon.

Irrespective of whether wood-fiber supply expands or contracts because of forest certification, demand for housing related wood products will shrink if we adopt a true compact living strategy of the kind described earlier. Why? If we increase the share of multi-family housing in the total mix, the amount of building material required per house will decline. Remember in a four unit townhouse, each housing unit shares two of its walls with others. The amount of building material for walls can be cut roughly in half. Similarly in apartment buildings, walls are shared. The point is simple—urban high-density housing uses less material per unit of floor space than the low-density, detached, suburban kind. Also, high density living will favor older cities where many solid older buildings can be recycle for housing, saving on virgin materials. The stimulation of LEED-certified construction with tax credits and LEED-points for recycled building materials should also reduce the demand for virgin lumber. Forest certification and carbon sequestration could put a dent in the supply of virgin wood fiber, but compact living will dampen demand as well, keeping lumber prices from shooting up too far.

Pushing the domestic supply of wood fiber in an environmentally friendly direction will tend to push up the demand for less costly, uncertified imports. This would amount to transferring bad forestry practices in this country to the rest of the world, something we want to avoid given the degree to which ecologically rich forests overseas stand threatened by exploitation. Requiring the certification of imported wood products in one fell swoop avoids this problem and gives good forest management a global boost.

Along with compact living, compact energy, and compact cuisine, we can have compact forestry in the sense that we leave more of the forest to nature itself and make use of the rest in a manner friendly to biological diversity. At the same time, we can absorb some extra carbon and diminish the extent of global warming. Compact living will make compact forestry more economically feasible than otherwise by reducing our demand for wood fiber.