Boutique Earth

Whole Earth,  Summer, 2001  by Stefan Jones

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When I was a wee kid, people tossed around the phrase "Lifeboat Earth."

I was a grim little kid and, like a lot of grim, serious kids, really got into the environmentalist version of hellfire and brimstone. Besides allowing us grim kids to feel superior to the oblivious fools having fun at recess, the prospect of a nasty, crowded future made for cool movies like Soylent Green.

Grim, serious people favor simple, grim futures, and if they can come up with solutions to this prospect, they propose some simple, grim ones. Lifeboats are very grim places, with satisfyingly simple rules. Everyone shares equally what little we've got. Don't hog the bench space. Don't rock the boat. Wait your turn. Behave--or get shoved off the gunwale.

You couldn't trust a lifeboat zealot to sit your house or feed your cat, much less manage the joint fate of humanity.

Fuller's "Spaceship Earth" was also much in the air in my youth, and it sounded more promising. Spaceships feature life-support systems. Spaceships have rules for engineers, a group much advanced beyond survivalists. Understand the system, keep it in good repair, don't try to pack in too many people, and then we'll have cool views out the portholes; we'll have fun bouncing from the walls and ceilings. Fuller's conceptual spaceships are clean, organized places (unlike actual spaceships, such as Mir, which was moldy, smelly, trash-filled, and susceptible to catastrophic blowouts and fires).

As a much less grim, much older kid, I've become suspicious of the motives of grim, serious people with simple ideas. The Earth, its people, and their interrelationships are anything but simple. A planet is neither lifeboat nor spaceship. Lifeboats and spaceships are human inventions in which small groups of people go places. The discipline and deprivation required to live in these gizmos is tolerable because, eventually, you're going to get off of them. You can return to a complicated life on the actual Earth.

People expect more out of life than simple survival or minirealist rocket-powered engineering. They will insist on it. And they'll get it, even if it means packing a suitcase and heading for the border, or shooting the bastards in charge.

THE (MANY) PROBLEMS AT HAND

Misapplied analogies and simplistic models are the stuff of crank science, quack medicine, and scary cults. We need to make a conscious effort to move beyond this. We have numerous problems with complex causes. They require complex and varied solutions, involving complicated, multiplex, mercurial people who use a wide variety of approaches.

Climate change is caused by industries fouling the air with particulates, methane, carbon dioxide, and other gases. These industries are creating a poorer, messier, less stable environment for all of us, because we pay them to do that. This happens because of what we buy: what goods are made of, how we make them, and how we use them.

Common consumer goods seem amazingly cheap because their makers have heavily invested in economies of scale and learning curves. There is nothing inherently evil about cheap consumer goods, if the complex external costs are figured in. But if consumers are blind to every factor but price, while that is all a manufacturer or retailer can offer us--then we're all in a race for the bottom that leads us to sweatshops; strip mines; and those filthy, cheap, coal-burning power plants.

SLOW FOOD

This screed might sound familiar to followers of the Slow Food Movement (e.g. www.slowfood.com). Conceived by organic farmers, gourmet chefs, and others concerned with the debasement of culinary culture, this movement opposes a parallel race to the bottom that is ruining agriculture. Slow-food fans champion quality over quantity. They hope to change our mental picture of lunch from that thoughtless burger-and-fries to a carefully created meal made from fresh local ingredients, intended for our leisurely enjoyment.

Slow food is, deliberately and defiantly, the polar opposite of fast food. A fast-food restaurant's kitchen is a factory floor employing economies of scale and hard-won operational learning. The workers there are not cooks. The dishes are created with rigid consistency, with cheap manufacturing and cheap transport in mind. These calorie merchants carpet bomb the diners' taste buds with grease and salt. Their ingredients could come from literally anywhere on the planet; consumers are deliberately blinded to the source of the production chain.

Sound familiar? It's lifeboat chow--canned beef and hard tack--in a minimalist framework.

VIRIDIAN DESIGN

The Viridian Movement seeks to do for all consumer goods what the Slow Food Movement does for food. The heroes of the Viridian Movement will be the analogue of gourmet chefs: gourmet industrial designers.

Too many of the items in our homes were conceived and designed after World War II, a distant epoch of whirring assembly lines, filthy energy, and environmental obliviousness. Too many products have barely evolved since that time. They may have strapped on bells and whistles, and shed their heavy steel shells in favor of plastics, but they still mentally dwell in the 1940s. They're fat on voltage; they waste water, and they are dumb, inert, and overbuilt.