the hotspring quarterly - sept. 2012
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This publication represents the work of a community of thinkers, researchers, reporters, educators, innovators and committed change-makers, focused on cultivating a broader and deeper awareness of the types of crisis that face humanity. Our purpose is to share ideas to bring solutions into being that are better, more effective and more conducive to mutual thriving, than anything within the prevailing paradigm.TRANSCRIPT
e Humane Future ManifestoA hot spring is a place where the life-sustaining chemistry of
nature is concentrated and gives generously enough to yield
new variety, new color and the hot interplay of competing
approaches to living and thriving. The Hot Spring Network
seeks to be that kind of place, where people committed to a
more generous, humane and imaginative future gather to help
make it real.
Human beings do not have to be rapacious, faction-focused
scavengers, fighting to take what little is available to those
around them, serving a logic of fear and exclusion. The world’s
great religions all recognize this, and yet history shows us that
narrowness of focus, dehumanization of the other, greed and
failure of imagination, routinely conspire to make individuals,
institutions, even whole societies, impediments to imaginative
problem solving and mutual thriving.
Most people have no genuine desire to be anything so
negative toward the rest of humanity, yet the momentum of
history pushes people to fight over that all-important
“spoonful” everyone is chasing.
What makes the difference is whether we have real faith that
better is possible.
The Hot Spring Network is an act of faith in support of the
idea that we are built to overcome greed, collapse and scarcity.
Our project is a commitment to building a more vibrant, more
humane, more sustainable, more democratic and just future
for all people, in harmony with the Earth’s natural life-support
systems.
We can achieve this through science, technology, art, culture,
innovation and public policy.
We have a moral obligation to do so.
To add your name or to share with friends, go to: http://bit.ly/humanefuture
Welcome to the inaugural edition of The Hot Spring
Quarterly. This publication represents the work of a
community of thinkers, researchers, reporters, educators,
innovators and committed change-makers, focused on
cultivating a broader and deeper awareness of the types
of crisis that face humanity. Our purpose is to share
ideas to bring solutions into being that are better, more
effective and more conducive to mutual thriving, than
anything within the prevailing paradigm.
We take as our thematic focus, for this inaugural edition,
the Hot Spring Network's slogan "hunting the paradigm
shift", because in all of the pieces we have collected in
these pages, that spirit of thoughtful, humane, fairness-
expanding change is at work. This project will also be the
guiding philosophy of this publication, whatever thematic
or disciplinary focus there may be in future editions.
Visit TheHotSpring.net for more information regarding
generative economics, clean energy and fuel free
transport, people-focused innovations in public policy,
including education, energy, media and finance, and for a
leading-edge exploration of the accelerating technological
phenomenon of hyper-convergence, in which media
devices are integrating more and more seamlessly into
our psychological, political and material lives.
We are working to build a global community of interested,
imaginative collaborators, hopeful about the future and
committed to contributing their voice, their energy, their
creativity and their leadership, to building better
outcomes into the fabric of choices and influences that
define our experience and determine conditions at the
human scale.
We hope to bring you the information you need to be part
of that process.
Joseph Robertson
Creator / Director, The Hot Spring Network
First EditionSeptember 2012
Copyright © 2012The Hot Spring Network
All collaborators, including publications sharing
previously published work in these pages, retain
copyright protections pertaining to those works.
Read & share online The Hot Spring Quarterly is
available online, at: http://bit.ly/hotspring-q
ContactIf you are interested in
contributing to the Hot Spring Quarterly, joining the
Hot Spring Network or organizing an event with
featured authors on or these subjects, please direct all
correspondence to the editors, via email, at:
Join the Network
Visit www.TheHotSpring.net to join the network and start
building a more vibrant human future, today.
e Hot Spring Network is founded on the view that genuinely revolutionary ideas for solving the most intractable crises come more easily when open and imaginative minds collaborate, without prejudice. e poet Linda Hogan wrote, in her book Dwellings: “What we are really searching for is a language that heals [our] relationship [with the rest of the natural order], one that takes the side of the amazing and fragile life on our life-giving earth…” Today’s human population faces emerging crises of a complexity and a scale never before confronted by humanity. Our intention is to develop the vocabulary for over-the-horizon thinking, as rich in detail as the broad fabric of humanity, so we are fit and able to deal with the complexities we face.
The Hot Spring Network is committed to the idea that
optimism is not a project of hoping against all
probability, but rather one of accurately judging that
better is possible, then striving for the optimal outcome,
in any given circumstance. To spread awareness, we
highlight on TheHotSpring.net specific projects,
individuals, organizations and ventures that help to
illustrate this principle and to carry out this project.
The following articles are representative of the spirit that
holds that BETTER is possible. For more information,
please visit: http://bit.ly/betterispossible
Why Everyone Should Be a Futuristby William S. Becker
This article first appeared in the May 2012 edition of the Solutions journal.
In hearing rooms, hallways, and conferences
where the world’s policymakers are wrestling
with the big issues of our day, something
important is missing: Vision.
By vision, I don’t mean those forward-
looking policy papers that tell us how we
might shape the future with a global Green
New Deal, or the Millennium Development
Goals, or a Copenhagen Accord. Those
intellectual constructs are critical, but they
are not enough.
We’re missing visions of the right-brain
variety—immersive, lifelike visual images of
the future we want, conveyed with the same
powerful technologies that moviemakers use
to entertain us and the advertising industry
uses to sell us things. Think about it.
Wouldn’t it be interesting if we mobilized our
visual arts and tools to change sustainable
development from an abstraction into
something we all can see?
In the brutal battles over public policy
these days, visions of the kind I’m describing
seem fluffy, as though we’re entering the
arena with swords made of cotton instead of
steel. However, as the late Donella Meadows
put it, “Vision is the most vital step in the
policy process. If we don’t know where we
want to go, it makes little difference that we
make great progress.”1
This is not to say our communications
industries don’t show us anything about the
future. But they focus on the future we must
avoid rather than the future we must create.
It’s likely that the apocalypse is coming right
now to a theater near you. Think of The Day
After Tomorrow, The Road, An Inconvenient
Truth, The 11th Hour, or 2012, to name a few
movies in recent years. We’ve seen endless
te lev is ion shows on the f r ightening
prophecies of Nostradamus and the Mayan
calendar. The Discovery Channel has shown
us in nightmarish detail Ten Ways the World
Will End. Apparently thinking it’s a public
service to help us prepare, the channel is
airing a series called Doomsday Shelters in
which families who call themselves “preppers”
are building underground shelters stocked
with food, weapons, and ammunition. News
media are governed by the “if it bleeds, it
leads” rule, showing us economic collapse,
homelessness, war, terrorism, natural
disasters, and other symptoms of social
collapse every evening at dinnertime. We revel
in our fears but do not reveal our dreams.
For what would seem to be sound tactical
reasons, environmental advocates also focus
on fear as a motivator. The “fight or flight”
reaction seems to be a more powerful force
for change than happy visions of security and
abundance . The p r ominen t B r i t i sh
environmentalist Jonathon Porritt notes that
there is a
continuing lack of any compelling
narrative focusing on the upside of living
within environmental limits rather than
on the multiple downsides of exceeding
those limits. Many more people count
themselves as environmentalists out of a
desire to avoid a potential ecological
apocalypse rather than out of a belief in
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some “Promised Land” flowing with
organic milk and rainforest honey.
He continues:
This lack of a compelling upside narrative
exposes environmentalists to the rabble-
rousing charge of being anti-progress and
anti-aspiration—a charge that sounds
more and more convincing as more and
more environmentalists let it be known
that they believe it is either “already too
late” to do anything about the gathering
apocalypse, or, in order to avoid it being
too late, that we need to go onto an
instantaneous “war footing” to combat
accelerating climate change—whatever
the consequences for democracy. For
wholly understandable historical and
intellectual reasons, today’s environ-
mental discourse is still shaped far more
powerfully by the language of “scarcity”
and “limits” than it is by any compelling
upside narrative. But fear of the future
does not empower people; it debilitates
and disempowers.2
We can find a corollary in international
negotiations, where the conversation is about
which nations will sacrifice growth to cut
carbon emissions, rather than who will be the
first to seize the enormous opportunities in a
global transition to sustainability.
The resulting stalemate makes us
pessimistic that our international institutions
can deal with this century’s global problems.
That pessimism can easily become a self-
fulfilling prophecy. Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth
Anderson, authors of The Cultural Creatives:
How 50 Million People Are Changing the
World, write, “Today as we are besieged by
planetary problems, the risk is that we will
deal with them in a pessimistic and
unproductive style. Transfixed by an image of
our own future decline, we could actually
bring it about.”3
In the best case, problems push us to
action. But to find its sense of direction, the
“push” needs help from the “pull” of positive
vision. The Transition Town movement, a
grassroots network that began in the United
Kingdom, helps communities become more
resilient against threats such as peak oil,
climate change, and economic instability.
That’s a response to “push.” But the
movement’s founder, permaculture expert
Rob Hopkins, also understands the power of
“pull”:
It is one thing to campaign against
climate change and quite another to
paint a compelling and engaging vision
of a post-carbon world in such a way as
to enthuse others to embark on a
journey toward it. We are only just
beginning to scratch the surface of the
power of a positive vision of an
abundant future.4
Business has long understood the power of
vision in attracting customers. General
Motors illustrated it more than 70 years ago
at the New York World’s Fair. In the hangover
of the Great Depression, GM commissioned
theatrical designer Norman Bel Geddes to
create Futurama, a pavilion in which an
estimated 20 million visitors were conveyed
through models of life 20 years in the future.
At its core, GM’s vision was a dynamic, highly
mobile, car-centered society—an appealing
alternative to the life many of the visitors
were experiencing. A case can be made that
GM’s vision built public support for the way
we’ve designed cities and transportation
systems ever since.
8
But the 1930s GM model doesn’t work
anymore. We need a new vision.
The Future We Want
In 2009, Michael Northrop, the director of the
Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s sustainable
development program, convened 30 sustain-
ability and communications experts to
explore why the public was not more engaged
in fighting for a more sustainable world. We
who participated talked about “apocalypse
fatigue”—the tendency for people to withdraw
from solving problems that seem over-
whelming and unsolvable. We also observed
that today’s social media and the Internet
make it possible to have a global conversation
about “push” and “pull.” We decided that we
need to help the broad and largely disengaged
public understand the future we can build,
based on visions that are realistic, achiev-
able, and positive.
That was the inception of a project now
called The Future We Want. We are inviting
people around the world to share their ideas
about what they want their communities and
lives to be like 20 years from now. We are
mobil iz ing world-class technologists,
designers, planners, and artists to show us
what life would be like if we confronted
today’s challenges head-on and built a world
that reflected people’s hopes.
In 2011, we took the project to the United
Nations, which was planning Rio+20—its
Conference on Sustainable Development in
June 2012 on the 20th anniversary of the
first Earth Summit. With agility uncharac-
teristic for such a large institution, the United
Nations’ entire chain of command adopted
“The Future We Want” as the official tagline
for Rio+20. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
announced it on November 22, 2011; a few
months later, he embraced it as the theme for
his next five-year agenda at the United
Nations.
As the project progressed, we found we
weren’t the only organization engaged in
exploring vision. My Green Dream, led by
May East from the Findhorn community in
Scotland, has deployed “dream catchers”
around the world to collect short videos of
people describing their aspirations for the
future. Sustainia, a project of the Danish
think tank Monday Morning, has organized a
competition to identify the 100 best ideas to
achieve sustainable societies by 2020. Rather
than awarding its annual cash prize to an
individual in 2012, TED launched City 2.0,
calling for concepts on the city of the future.
The Institute for Transportation and Policy
Development in New York commissioned
architects in ten cities around the world to
draw what sustainable development would
look like at specific blighted locations in each
place.
Corporations, who see the future in terms
of markets, are entering the dialogue too.
Siemens has its own exhibit of the cities of
tomorrow, as does its competitor, General
Electric. Corning has produced a video on a
futuristic “day made of glass.”
Some of the leaders in the world’s
principal oil patch also are thinking about the
future—in their case, the post-petroleum
world. Years ago, a Saudi Arabian oil minister
warned that oil reserves would not be
depleted before renewable energy takes over
the world’s energy markets. (In a quote for
the ages, the minister, Sheikh Zaki Yamani,
observed that the Stone Age didn’t end
9
because we ran out of stones.) Today, the
royal family in Abu Dhabi is positioning the
United Arab Emirates as a global thought
leader on sustainable energy, sponsoring an
annual World Energy Futures Conference and
working on the world’s first carbon-neutral
city.
The contributions of these change agents
and visionaries haven’t yet penetrated the
world’s policy circles. We remain in a rut of
oil and coal, flirting with even worse forms of
fossil energy and with technologies we don’t
know how to control, like nuclear energy,
geoengineering and carbon sequestration.
The entrenched and well-financed fossil
energy industries are so far more interested
in finding ways to extend the oil age than
they are in helping us achieve a new energy
economy—an economy that would sustain
them, too, if they made the transition with
the rest of us. Lacking a better vision, the
developing world still considers the Western
model of consumption and car-dependent
cities the highest expressions of progress.
But in this time in which our old
institutions and systems are failing us; in
which powerful and entrenched vested
interests are fighting to maintain a status quo
that cannot be maintained; in which the
impacts of climate change are becoming more
frequent, severe, and undeniable; and in
which our confidence in the old economic
order has been shaken, we have reached a
teachable moment not unlike the one that
General Motors seized in 1939.
It is time to envision the future we want,
to get the global community talking about it,
and to insist on the public policies that will
allow us to achieve it. Given the finality of
problems such as species loss, peak oil, and
climate change, every day we delay makes the
“upside narrative” less credible. But if we
decide to grasp it, a future we want is still
within reach. Buckminster Fuller had it right:
“We are called to be architects of the future,
not its victims.”
References
1. Meadows, D in Getting Down to Earth,
Practical Applications of Ecological (Costanza,
R, Segura, O & Martinez-Alier, J, eds)
Envisioning a sustainable world (Island Press,
Washington, DC, 1996).
2. Porritt, J. Scarcity and Sustainability in
Utopia. Insights Paper 4(4) (Durham
University and the Institute of Advanced
Study, 2011).
3. Ray, P & Anderson, SR. The Cultural
Creatives: How 50 Million People Are
Changing the World (Three Rivers Press, New
York, 2000).
4. Hopkins, R. The Transition Handbook: From
oil dependency to local resilience (Green
Books, 2008).
Today’s Visionaries
Nongovernmental Organizations
2020: Shaping the Future, a series of videos
from Ericsson Worldwide with thought
leaders offering their ideas for the future.
(www.ericsson.com/campaign/20about2020).
Adaptive Edge, specializing in futures
thinking, strategy, and innovation. It
describes itself as “pathfinders for leaders on
10
the brink of change” (www.adaptive-
edge.com).
America 2050: Journey to Detroit, a video
visualization of transportation options of the
future (www.america2050.org/2010/02/
journey-to-detriot.html). Produced by the
America 2050 program at the Regional Plan
Association, New York.
Collective Invention, which develops
experiential future scenarios to help leaders
innovate for the common good
(www.theworldcafecommunity.org).
Monday Morning, whose Project Green Light
has published The Guidebook to Sustainia,
the vision of a sustainable future (http://
greengrowthleaders.org/project-green-light).
My Green Dream, a project of the UN
Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR)
and the CIFAL Network. It has deployed
“dream catchers” to 15 countries (at last
count), taping short video interviews in which
people state their aspirations for the future
(http://green-dream.co.uk/dreams).
One Earth Initiative, whose objective is to
“rethink the Good Life” and to transform
unsustainable consumption and production
(http://oneearthweb.org).
Our Cities/Our Selves: The Future of Transportation in Urban Life, a project of
the Institute for Transportation and Policy
Planning (www.ourcitiesourselves.org).
The World Café, a place where visitors
gather to share experiences and explore
collective action
(www.theworldcafecommunity.org).
U.S. PIRG: Transportation of the Future, a
video produced by a nine-year-old, one of the
entries in a U.S. Public Interest Research
Group’s video contest. (www.youtube.com/
watch?v=sbX38qeVCqo).
Corporate Visualizations
Arnold Imaging, a Kansas City company that
facilitates green development with videos and
animations showing how sustainable design
and technologies benefit the built
environment and quality of life
(www.arnoldimaging.com).
Corning’s A Day Made of Glass
(www.youtube.com/watch_popup?
v=6Cf7IL_eZ38&vq=medium).
Enel on imagining the smart grid
(www.youtube.com/watch?
v=sV6o3t_bNN4&feature=related).
General Motors’ Dreams of Flight, imagining
the future of air transportation (www.ge.com/
thegeshow/future-flight). Also, GM’s electric
networked vehicles
(www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?
id=electric-networked-vehicle-gm).
Kjellgren Kaminsky Architecture’s video,
Super Sustainable City—Gothenburg
(www.youtube.com/watch?
v=aMFnmpNsaqg&feature=related).
Microsoft’s vision of the future videos
(www.singularityweblog.com/microsofts-
vision-for-the-future-videos).
Siemens’ sustainable cities vision,
including Changing Your City for the Better, a
video competition to show how people are
using technology to overcome humanity’s
11
challenges (http://zooppa.com/contests/
changing-your-city-for-the-better). Also, the
company’s video on how to make sustainable
cities (www.usa.siemens.com/sustainable-
cities/?stc=usccc025107).
Solutions
Design with the Other 90%: Cities, the
latest in a series of exhibits featuring design
solutions that address the 90 percent of the
world’s population not traditionally served by
professional designers
(www.designother90.org/cities/home).
Young Voices for the Planet, a film series
featuring young people working on reducing
the carbon footprint of their schools, homes
and communities (http://
youngvoicesonclimatechange.com/climate-
change-videos.php).
Inspiration
Apple’s Here’s to the Crazy Ones
(www.youtube.com/watch?
v=4oAB83Z1ydE&feature=related).
Make Your Own Visions
Make a comic strip about sustainability in
your community (www.pixton.com/
overview#video and www.pixton.com/ca).
The Author
William S. Becker is Executive Director of the
National Sustainable Communities Coalition.
He serves as a senior associate at two
sustainable development think tanks: Third
Generation Environmentalism in London and
Natural Capitalism Solutions in Colorado. He
spent 15 years as a senior official in the U.S.
Department of Energy. At DOE, he founded
the Center of Excellence for Sustainable
Development, organized expert teams to
provide technical assistance to more than
130 U.S. communities on sustainable
development, including “green recovery” for
communities rebuilding after natural
disasters. Starting in 2007, he served as
Executive Director of the Presidential Climate
Action Project, a four-year initiative that
produced nearly 200 recommendations on
national climate and energy policies for the
2008 presidential candidates, the Obama
Administration, and Congress. He is a
frequent contributor to Huffington Post,
Think Climate, and several other environ-
mental blogs. Mr. Becker is a veteran of the
Vietnam War, where he won the Bronze Star
medal as a combat correspondent. His latest
book, The 100 Day Action Plan to Save the
Planet, was published by St. Martin’s Press in
New York.
12
VILLANOVA UNIVERSITY’S ANNUAL DAY
OF SERVICE: MORE THAN 2/3 OF THE
STUDENT BODY VOLUNTEER THEIR
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IN SOME SMALL WAY, AT THE HUMAN
SCALE, IN COMMUNITIES ACROSS
PHILADELPHIA & THE SURROUNDING
REGION. THE DAY IS TREATED LIKE A
CELEBRATION & STUDENTS VALUE THE
OPPORTUNITY TO CONTRIBUTE TO
THE LIVES OF OTHERS.
bit.ly/vuserves
Up to Something Big: Stories that Inspire Changeby Davia Rivka
The following texts are both excerpts from the
book Up to Something Big: Stories That
Inspire Change. Visit daviarivka.com to learn
more about the book.
Keeping Big Company
People want their lives to matter. They are
hungry to leave the world a better place than
they found it. They passionately want to
make a difference but don’t always know
where to begin, how to stay focused or what
to do when challenges seem insurmountable.
It is not easy. Stretching into challenging
places takes consistent commitment. Left to
ourselves we too often slip, forget, back away.
But when we surround ourselves with others
up to something big, we can keep each other
on track, remind each other of who we are at
our best.
Margaret Mead, the noted anthropologist,
said, “Never doubt that a small group of
thoughtful, committed citizens can change
the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever
has.”
Whether “the world” we focus on is the
planet or our own backyard, it is our
community of “thoughtful, committed
citizens” who hold us to account. They are
our witnesses, reflecting back to us our
highest dreams, encouraging us to step
forward with the best we have to offer. And in
turn, we are their witnesses, encouraging
them to step forward with the best they have
to offer.
Be up to something big. We’re in this
together.
How We Live Matters
A woman climbs down a steep, craggy
mountain, tethered to a woman above her
and a man below. Pressed against the hard
rock face, several hundred feet from solid
ground, all three are alert and vigilant. They
are acutely aware of the rope tension, the
crevices, their grip. Details are critical,
attention crucial, integrity essential. Her life
is in their hands.
Their lives are in hers.
The whole world is like that now, in this
age of global interconnectedness. We are all
tethered. We can pull one another up or we
can weigh one another down. We are in it
together, like it or not.
How we live matters.
Here is my invitation to you. Look beyond
your personal life. Know that your move-
ments matter, that your actions rever-berate,
that your words ripple across the globe. Be
up to something big—by tending not just to
your wildest visions but to your everyday
actions. Call forth the best in yourself, and in
others. Massage the fate of the world as it
passes through your hands. Live as though
we are counting on you to hold the rope taut.
We are.
14
The Author
Davia specializes in working with leaders
committed to social change. She has been
exploring the intersection of personal growth
and social change for over forty years. After
receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree with
honors from the University of California,
Berkeley, a Master of Science degree in health
sciences from the University of Utah, and a
Master of Arts degree in clinical psychology
from Antioch University, she earned her
coaching certification from Coach Training
Institute and opened her coaching practice in
2001. In addition to her academic back-
ground, her approach has been informed by
years of service work. For two decades she
worked as a volunteer with RESULTS, an
advocacy organization committed to ending
poverty, where she trained volunteers to step
outside their comfort zones in the name of a
larger commitment. She has been trained in
the Native American Way of Council; a
process of sitting in a circle, inviting deep
listening and personal story to build
community, explore challenging issues and
facilitate movement.
Davia was inspired to write her recently
published book, Up to Something Big: Stories
That Inspire Change, while listening to her
clients’ stories, and the commitment they
made to working with the challenges that
come from living a life that matters.
Explore her projects online, at:
www.daviarivka.com
Citizens Climate Lobby: Participatory Democracy Resurgentby Joseph Robertson
Citizens Climate Lobby volunteers from across
North America gather outside US Capitol,
holding signs that say “I am a carbon tax”.
July 24, 2012.
“If you want to join the fight to save the planet,
to save creation for your grand-children, there
is no more effective step you could take than
becoming an active member of this group.”
—Dr. James Hansen: physicist, member of the
National Academy of Sciences, grandpa,
director of the Goddard Institute for Space
Studies, NASA
In order to ensure that our economic and
environmental policies harmonize with the
life-as-lived interests of ordinary human
beings, at the human scale, a grassroots
movement of citizens has begun working to
steer the US Congress away from corporate
backers and toward people-centered solu-
tions. The American economy’s dependence
on fossil fuels carries an incredible burden of
hidden costs, and the American people are
15
increasingly aware that clean energy will
make the nation more prosperous, more
environmentally stable and more democratic.
Citizens Climate Lobby is a non-partisan,
non-profit volunteer organization, with over
60 local chapters in 26 states, and more in
Canada. Founded in late 2007, by the anti-
poverty crusader and microfinance hero
Marshall Saunders, its first national “con-
ference”, in Washington, DC, in 2009,
brought Marshall, along with organizing
wizard Mark Reynolds and scientist Danny
Richter, to Capitol Hill to press Congress to
end the nation’s addiction to carbon-based
fuels.
In June 2010, CCL’s first true volunteer
conference brought 25 volunteers from across
the United States together for informational
seminars, lobby training and Capitol Hill
visits. That small group met with 52
Congressional offices and several more from
the executive branch. In 2011, it was 80
volunteers, making 144 visits to Con-
gressional offices. Since then, CCL has begun
participating in the World Bank Civil Society
Forum, to urge representatives from the
World Bank, IMF, OECD and other inter-
national development organizations to lead in
the push for a price on carbon-based fuels.
For the first time, in 2012, the legislative
solution CCL supports has already been
introduced into the Ways and Means
Committee of the House of Representatives,
and members of Congress can sit with
citizens to hear them call for sponsorship of
pending legislation.
In 2012, 175 volunteers attended, from
across the United States and Canada, making
more than 300 visits to Congressional offices,
in just 4 days of lobbying, while personally
delivering materials to the rest of the House
and Senate—a feat made possible by the
scheduling acrobatics of Amy Bennet and a
dedicated team of interns.
By early 2010, the organization had
foreseen that the highly complicated
regulatory strategy known as Cap and Trade
—with its trading scheme ripe for derivative
finance shenanigans—would not become law.
So, by June of that year, CCL was working to
get the word out about a proposal called
Carbon Fee and Dividend. The strategy is
simple, streamlined, revenue-neutral, con-
sumer friendly, requires no new bureaucracy,
is easy to harmonize internationally and will
do more to reduce carbon dioxide emissions
and speed the arrival of a true clean-energy
economy. The plan:
• a steadily escalating fee on carbon-based
fuels, at the source (mine, well, port of entry
to the United States);
• a dividend (or monthly “bonus check”) to
households equivalent to 100% of the
revenue from the fee;
• a border adjustment (WTO-compliant) to
en-sure foreign businesses don’t get away
without paying the fee...
The 100% dividend ensures that more than
2/3 of all households will receive more in
their bonus check than all collateral price
increases resulting from the fee. As the fee
escalates, so does the dividend. This clear
price signal allows the true marketplace—
Main Street, USA, together with cutting edge
innovation and entrepreneurship—to take
over, giving renewables an edge, even without
subsidies, and releasing hundreds of billions
of dollars in private capital to go to work
building a fuel free all-clean-energy economy,
16
suited to the global challenges of the 21st
century.
The CCL approach allows ordinary citizens
to gather together, to better reach local and
national media, build support among voters
and raise the level of debate in the halls of
Congress. In 2010, it was Cap and Trade or
bust on the Hill; in 2011, Fee and Dividend
was intriguing to both liberals and con-
servatives on the Hill, but too new to catch
fire and lead the debate; in late 2011, how-
ever, the Save Our Climate Act (SOCA) was
intro-duced in the House Committee on Ways
and Means, and was built on the Fee and
Dividend model, though it devotes a portion
of revenue to debt reduction.
From July 2011 through July 2012, CCL’s
volunteers and staff have published three
hundred articles in local and national
newspapers and on major blog sites like the
Huffington Post. Thanks to the tireless efforts
of media director Steve Valk, and volunteers
like Ellie Whitney and Mike Morton, CCL was
able to release a 382-page 12-month Press
File1, in July 2012, compiling these letters
and op-eds.
In 2012, every office on Capitol Hill has
been made aware of Fee and Dividend, of its
Main-Street-focused approach, and SOCA is
likely to go to a 100% dividend in the new
year, increasing the monthly bonus paid to
households and making the bill’s economic
impact into more of a virtuous feedback loop
capable of building a thriving 21st century
clean-energy economy.
The strategy is supported by mainstream
economists, social and fiscal conservatives,
by Reagan advisors and progressive members
of the House of Representatives, and by the
world’s top climate scientist, James Hansen
of NASA. Reagan chief economist Art Laffer
and former House Republican Bob Inglis, a
social conservative, are now calling for a
revenue neutral carbon tax to break the
nation’s dependence on costly fossil fuels and
speed the transition to a clean economy.
CCL’s successes constitute a regeneration
of participatory democracy, with a focus on
the nation’s climate and energy policy. The
same model has been used with astonishing
success by RESULTS to win Congressional
support for action to eliminate poverty, treat
and eradicate disease, and overcome social
exclusion, around the world. Tens of millions
of people have been lifted out of poverty by
the work of RESULTS volunteers over the last
three decades.
This year’s conference recognized the
importance of the Quechua-language phrase
“Kachkaniraqmi”—“I am here; I still exist.”
Vibrant, constructive participatory democracy
requires that people dwell in this world in a
conscious way, and show up where decisions
are made, to be citizens and to remind elected
officials that we are here; we exist… and that,
above all other considerations, that matters.
NOTE: The author is a volunteer for Citizens
Climate Lobby, and author of the report
Building a Green Economy: On the Economics
of Carbon Pricing and the Transition to Clean,
Renewable Fuels, for the Hot Spring Network
and CCL. (See pg. 25 for more detail.)
17
1 You can read the CCL Press File online for free at: www.issuu.com/hotspring/docs/ccl-press_file-120728
Deep green economics entails a focus on full-spectrum
sustainability—sustainability in all aspects of our
relationship to the universe: the natural environment,
human neighbors, even our conscious envisioning of
what exists and/or is possible. Two foundational
principles underly this way of thinking green:
1.G.O.O.D.-based economic reasoning and analysis
(addressing the generative organic optimization
demand not previously addressed in the conventional
economic and political dynamics we think of as
business-as-usual);
2. Impact at the human scale (genuine inquiry into what
happens to individual, family and community-level
lived experience, as the result of policies that foster
development, investment distribution, innovation or
technological enhancement).
This section explores aspects of the deep green economic
revolution, already ongoing, and suggests solutions that
can help point the way toward a future in which no one
is disadvantaged by resource scarcity, the manipulation
of commodities markets, or lethal forms of industrial-
scale contamination. Deep green means conducive to
sustainable mutual thriving across the full spectrum of
human relationships, to the advantage of human liberty.
GOOD-based Economics:To Restore Main Street & the Middle Classby Joseph Robertson
A version of the following article first appeared
on The Hot Spring Network, on September 10,
2012. The central ideas will also be the focus
of a roundtable event, at Villanova University,
in Pennsylvania, on November 1, 2012.
Generative economic activity is activity
which yields a greater range and volume of
resources than it consumes. For example,
investment in solar energy technology is
generative, because the more invested, the
more resources available; investment in fossil
fuels is not generative, because the more
invested, the more rapidly the finite amount
of resources are depleted.
Organic economic activity is activity that is
woven into the fabric of what is being done
throughout the marketplace in question.
Organic activity is not necessarily imposed
from above, but rather emerges into the
currents of energy and wealth exchange that
comprise the overall marketplace. This can
include, but is not limited to, activity that
emerges from intelligent regulation, incen-
tives and government investment. Organic
activity tends to become visible at the
community level, at the human scale, and
ultimately, it is the province of everyone who
operates predominantly at that level.
Optimization refers to a specific way of
imagining the value of economic activity. This
is not the old optimist/pessimist opposition,
but rather a practical differentiation between
the analysis of self-appointed “realists”, who
shy away from market-redefining innovations
dependent on imagination and quality, and
fact-based optimists, who look to achieve the
best possible outcome, given what is, and
who are not averse to imagining past the
paradigm shift.
Demand is the primordial driver of
economic activity. People need food and water
to live, so there is demand for supermarkets,
and for the entire fabric of agricultural and
industrial activity that supports them. The
demand for generative organic optimization of
our economic environment is rooted in the
very logic of human civilization: we devote our
intelligence, our collaborative capacity, our
resources—natural, synthetic and intellectual
—to always doing better than what would
naturally fall to us.
19
Why a GOOD-based framework for economic analysis?
Status quo is rooted in standardized
thinking; GOOD-based thinking is how we get
better. Conventional economics looks at
“demand” as the extant sum total of need and
want for specific items, services, etc. If X
number of Hummers are sold in a given year,
while a few sit unsold, then the supply,
filtered by distribution and pricing, is meeting
the demand, but overestimating by those few
that remain unsold. Some economists think
pricing determines demand, and others view
pricing as less important in the final analysis.
Analysis of past demand is supposed to
predict future demand, and so supplies are
adjusted to fit such predictions, as are
values, prices, investment patterns, etc. But
what is not accounted for is whether the
same people who generate the apparent
“demand” for Hummers might be happier
with equally muscular fuel free alternatives—
which bad economic think-ing has kept us
from building—at lower prices, and where the
air, water and food consumed by their family
would be safer.
Conventional analyses of demand do not
adequately account for the intangible, the
human element involved in assessing both
need and want, that drives the actual
decision-making of actual people.
People tend to look for opportunities to
make life more interesting, more comfortable
and more worthy of respect, on some level.
How those intangibles are calculated depends
in large part on the character of individuals,
so a real assessment of what might be
missing in a given market, the extant
demand, needs to look at how well that
market provides opportunities for the exercise
of personal character and imagination.
Generative Organic Optimization Demand
(GOOD) is a way of looking at the economic
landscape to determine how effective our
overall strategies—our leading business
interests, our laws, our system of education
and our fabric of community, those things we
do every day—are to achieving what people
expect, what in fact is demanded by the ever-
increasing population of human beings on
planet Earth: better outcomes.
For a century, Gross Domestic Product
(GDP) has served as a proxy for more precise
but elusive measures of progress toward
better outcomes. GDP totals all exchange
activity within a given set of political
boundaries, so it is easy to measure whether
the average exchange capacity per capita
(GDP per person) is increasing or decreasing.
But this does not tell us whether most people
are making progress toward a better
existence, in terms of personal liberty,
economic security and socio-political
empowerment.
If we transition to a way of thinking that
allows for GOOD-based economic analysis,
we will be better equipped to discuss in real
terms how people are living, what they are
striving for, and how we can envision and
collaborate to achieve better outcomes. So,
first things first...
What are the primordial GOOD considerations for individuals
and families?
Economic cycles as they relate to resources
are most often self-reinforcing: a fabric of
20
economic activity reliant on resource-
corrosive practices and depletion of generally
available stores (or potential output) of goods
and services will reinforce the cycle of
depletion as it expands; a fabric of economic
activity which generates added basic
resources for generalized consumption will
r e in f o r ce the cyc l e o f cons t ruc t i v e
collaborative improvement as it expands.
So, a GOOD-based economic improvement
strategy needs to cultivate and propagate
reinforcements of the following kinds:
• Biological: First of all are the life-sustaining
compounds without which human life is not
possible: clean air, clean water and food-
borne solid nutrients.
• Structural: Next are those structural
comforts of the built environment, without
which human beings are less able to achieve
long life expectancy and educational and
professional excellence: shelter, plumbing
and heat and electricity.
• Intellectual: Then come the intellectual
commodities: information, education,
technology sufficient for erasing the digital
divide.
• Political: The hope, then, would be that
with these come political liberties: freedom
of thought, freedom of assembly, freedom of
worship, freedom of the press, freedom from
all forms of discrimination, and an
enforceable guarantee of voting rights and
the right to petition the government for
redress of grievances.
• Community: Individuals and families tend
to be, as economic actors, expressions of
Generative Organic Optimization Demand,
specifically over and above the four
preceding categories of primordial GOOD
economic requirements : b io log ica l ,
structural, intellectual, political. Individuals
and families are best able to participate in
the economic , soc ia l and po l i t i ca l
constellation of influences, when there is
community infrastructure allowing for
substantive, character-driven interaction at
the human scale.
This means opportunities for children to
gather, play and compete, safely and without
undue ideological pressures or quality-of-life
dictation from budget processes, violent
crime, resource scarcity or contamination of
the environment. Some of these community
assets would be: art and music in school,
school sports, community-level recreational
activities, extracurricular educational
opportunities, and clinics, hospitals and
other services that guarantee quality
affordable on-time medical attention.
Measuring the quality, affordability (as
against individual, household and community
income) and accessibility of biological,
structural, intellectual, polit ical and
community infrastructure reinforcements is
then necessary to understanding what is
actually happening at the human scale, and
what innovations, incentives and/or
collaborative initiatives would build resiliency
and mutual thriving into the human
experience of a given community.
The Human Development Index (HDI) is an
attempt to look at the status of people,
families and communities, in relation to the
above-listed reinforcements, focusing on
health, education and living standards. The
benefit of GOOD-based human development
analysis would be to assess and determine to
what degree activities related to human
development are also generative, thus
21
meeting the GOOD requirements of a given
town, region or people.
What is GOOD for Main Street?
Once again:
• “generative” means resource-reinforcing;
• “organic” means generalized collaborative
spontaneous economic activity;
• “optimization” means improving conditions;
• “demand” refers to the real-world need for
such reinforcements that improve quality of
life at the human scale (individual, family
and community).
The Main Street economy is the heart of
GOOD economic analysis.
The five categories of GOOD-relative
reinforcements listed above can serve as a
guide for what to look for in the GOOD status
of the Main Street economy. The financial
collapse of 2008 was calamitous by any
application of GOOD-based economic
analysis: after a decade of declining
affordability of political and community
reinforcements, biological reinforcements,
and then structural, became so cost-
intensive, more than 1/6 of the total
population of the United States was living in
poverty.
Community banks, reliant on vibrant local
GOOD-relative economic activity, began to
collapse, and larger banks, reliant on vibrant
GOOD-relative financial activity more
broadly, also found themselves on the brink.
Intellectual reinforcements for the GOOD-
relative economic standing of Main Street
interests declined in every area except online
information. (Education, as well as access to
reliable real-time information about the
f inancial and legal framework of an
individual’s life landscape, was becoming ever
more expensive, just as people were losing
what wealth they had.)
Coming out of the 2008-2010 financial
sector collapse and restructuring, what the
Main Street economy most required was a
deliberate conscious focus on the part of
f inancia l inst i tut ions on the GOOD
requirements of individuals, families and the
fabric of surrounding community in which
they live day to day. That did not happen, so
lending has lagged, recovery in the housing
market is indecisive at best, and the rate of
new hiring is, accordingly, slow.
The expansion of GOOD-relative economic
reinforcements for Main Street requires a
comprehensive decentralization of private-
sector economic power. Oversized financial
institutions run up against an arithmetical
limit in their capacity for genuinely sustain-
able steadily increasing regular asset growth.
Eventually, there are no longer enough
resources outside their grasp to feed the
expansion of the value of what is within their
grasp.
There are specific activities financial
institutions can favor that will allow for a
momentum shift, toward the decentralizing of
economic power, effectively devolving power
to consumers, and freeing corporate interests
from the requirement to measure success
exclusively by raw numerical growth. The
leading consideration for the value of an
enterprise should then shift toward how it is
tied into achieving GOOD-relative reinforce-
ments for quality of life at the human scale.
22
Organic optimizing activities conducive to GOOD economic
status improvement
The organic optimizing activities required to
respond to GOOD should include:
• health-reinforcing food production;
• affordable health quality-enhancing goods
and services;
• intellectual agility-expanding goods and
services (educational and informational
liberation);
• community-level quality-of-life enterprises;
• human-scale banking initiatives aimed at
building GOOD-relative reinforcements into
local economic landscapes;
• crowd-funding for job creation, in mode of
the Opportunity Finance Network;
• a revenue-neutral fee on carbon emitting
fuels, with 100% dividend to households;
• d i s t r i b u t e d 1 0 0 % c l e a n - e n e r g y
infrastructure, training and services;
• cost-effective mass-market quick-charge
electric vehicles;
• municipal, state and federal policy
pr ior i t i es , rooted in fu l l -spectrum
sustainability;
• urban development innovations that provide
for pol lut ion-free af fordable public
transport...
Extreme examples might include:
• business solutions like crowd-funding of
foreclosure avoidance plans;
• 100% transparency in major conglomerate
banking or transnational financial enter-
prise;
• chartered partnerships between munici-
palities and local businesses, aimed at
hiring, educational opportunity, re-
creational quality of life and health funding;
• transitioning most business tax credits to
reward innovation, hiring, clean energy,
energy efficiency and health funding
initiatives;
• public-private partnerships in owning,
drawing revenue from 100% clean public
transit;
• direct investment in “breathable air”
initiatives;
• deliberate focus on tree planting, park
greening, throughout urban and exurban
areas;
• explicit plans to halve the number of
combustible fuel vehicles on a city or
region’s roads within 10 years...
In each case, these organic optimizing
activities optimize the GOOD economic status
of a city or region by incentivizing investment,
hiring and direct funding of improvements to
quality of life and to resource-generative
activities. They become organic by feeding
directly into the fabric of generalized everyday
economic activity. By becoming an organic
part of the wider fabric of economic activity,
everyone across the economic landscape is
empowered to contribute to the improvement
of their own circumstances, simply by
participating in generalized everyday eco-
nomic activity.
Where GOOD is missing from our economic calculus
Travel from Bayside, Queens, to Long Island
City, or to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, using
100% electric green tramways, and/or a
gleaming new monorail system, and you are
23
helping to pay for new employment, new
construction, immediate palpable improve-
ments to the aesthetics of the built environ-
ment, and for enhanced mobility and
economic opportunity across at least two
counties.
Build such a system into the wider fabric of
New York City and the region, and the benefit
to commuters, to commuter-dependent
enterprises, to the housing market, and to
the funding of schools, community re-
creational activities, public safety and health
treatment options supported by the public or
private sector, is still more noticeable. The
same sort of organic optimization can
generate new resources and better quality of
life in non-urban settings as well, as small
communities become 100% energy in-
dependent, and build in smart, innovative
enterprises, better quality of life, more
efficient transport and educational options,
each of these inducing new hiring and new
investment, at the local level.
In a city like Barcelona, Spain, refurbishing
central markets in every barrio of the city,
and adding 100% clean-energy-based new
construction and training programs, would
vastly enhance the amount of GOOD-relative
investment, cycling new wealth through the
generalized economy of middle class and
working families. It would also afford young
people with new routes into the labor market,
something Spain desperately needs.
In cities like Jakarta, Indonesia, Maputo,
Mozambique, or Mokha, Yemen, doing three
things would vastly improve the GOOD-
relative standing of millions of people:
• Incentivize investment by businesses and
municipalities in more permanent struc-
tural reinforcements, allowing people to
participate in and profit from the building in
their own communities;
• Put at the center of this new human-scale
construction initiative new schools and
health clinics;
• Build into the new structural reinforce-
ments 100% smart-grid-based clean energy
technologies, which would generate jobs
and new wealth in the communities
themselves...
These are examples, and enacting such
policies will require significant changes in the
way funds are disbursed. The World Bank
and IMF could be what they are supposed to
be—forces for good—by being forces for
GOOD-based generative reinforcements of an
economic sea change motivated by an
awareness of the benefits of real mutual
thriving. Without an aim to build GOOD-
based thinking into wider economic planning,
we will not overcome the corrosive tendencies
of exploitative hyper-consumption, and so we
will not do enough to eliminate poverty and
build a permanent democratically empowered
middle class.
GOOD-based economics is just a start, but
it is integral to understanding how we, as a
civilization, move forward in this increasingly
connected, personality-driven 21st century
where we hope that all people everywhere will
be free to live, work, dream and achieve, with
dignity, security and socio-political empower-
ment to back them up and to reinforce and
propagate the best outcomes of their best
intentions, talents and relationships.
24
Note on related topics
There is mounting evidence, as the fallout
from the Great Recession runs its course,
that the real-world value of what we call
economic activity can be best identified and
discussed as relating to an economic eco-
system’s ability to provide the intangible
values we tend to associate with “quality of
life”, with unique personal tastes and talents,
or with recognition of basic human dignity: in
early education, in higher education, in the
opportunities available for employment, and
in the manner in which life-support services
of the built environment—such as life-saving
health treatments, clean drinking water—are
provided. Detailing the manner in which
policy affects the availability of intangible and
transcendent value, at the human scale, is
and will be one of the main areas of focus of
the entire Hot Spring Network project.
Future issues of The HotSpring Quarterly
will examine issues of education, economic
development, food supply security, energy
acquisition and distribution, environmental
sustainability, health services, community life
and market fairness, through the lens of
GOOD-based economic analysis.
Learn More
Learn more about Generative Economics and
follow the Hot Spring Network’s ongoing
process of formulating measurements and
analyses rooted in GOOD-based economic
thinking, at: bit.ly/goodecon-ideas
The Author
Joseph Robertson is the creator and director
of the Hot Spring Network, and the editor-in-
chief of the Hot Spring Quarterly. He is a
volunteer for the non-partisan, non-profit
organization Citizens Climate Lobby, and is
the author of the Sept. 2010 report Building a
Green Economy: on the Economics of Carbon
Pricing and the Transition to Clean, Renewable
Fuels, which is distributed free of charge to
elected officials on Capitol Hill. He directs the
publications ProjectQuipu.net, FuelFree.me,
Protect El Yunque and Futurismo Verde. He
is a visiting instructor at Villanova University,
where he now serves as chair of the
Environmental Sustainability Committee’s
subcommittee on Operations and Energy Use,
directs the ClimateTalks.info series of inter-
disciplinary roundtables and lectures, and
leads the GreenNOVA.org community for
coordinating sustainability activities and
information on campus and beyond. All of his
projects can be found through the website
PoetEconomist.com
25
Saturation vs. Scalability: Old & Costly vs. Clean & Efficientby Joseph Robertson
A version of the following article first appeared
on The Hot Spring Network, on September 13,
2011.
Saturation means more of a given ingredient
cannot be added to a given volume or fabric
of activity, without spilling over, and being
wasted. The fossil fuels market is saturated,
in the sense that it cannot effectively
capitalize on major new production invest-
ment without major new construction of
productive facilities. The industry has
effectively pushed prices higher and cannot
reduce them without seeing a dropoff in
profits. Most people can no longer afford the
fuel they used to consume.
This raises the question of scalability.
Scalability refers to the notion that as activity
of a given kind expands, as the benefits and
efficiencies of size, reinforced by growing
market share, which means a greater ability
to determine outcomes, an economy of scale
arises: a thing begins to cost less per unit or
per usage, because a scalable activity has
made the unit or the usage cost less without
reducing overall revenues.
Scalability depends on many other features
of the marketplace, however. One of these is
the value of investment. Another is the avail-
ability of that investment. When a market has
already gone global, and is controlled by a
handful of mega-conglomerates and govern-
ments, and is saturated, and is pricing reliant
consumers out, investment slows down. In a
credit-scarce economy where no one is as
rich as the oil interests, even moreso.
The ability to rapidly scale up production,
and to create a potent and escalating visible
return on investment for consumers, is
hampered by justifiable skepticism about
where this globalized, saturated and en-
trenched market sector can hope to go. Add
to that this problem of a business model
whereby one consumes a finite fossil resource
that cannot be reproduced, burning one’s
assets as one goes, and you have a model
that does not shape up favorably for the 21st
century.
The S&P 500 are now sitting on over $1
trillion in accumulated cash reserves. This
money could, and normally would, be
invested in future economic development. But
sclerosis in the top-heavy oil sector, a serious
lack of capital in the hands of consumers,
and the real vulnerability of banks and even
governments, are all conspiring to hold that
money back. Wise investors understand that
when the marketplace for risk and in-
vestment fails, a rainy-day fund is the best
option.
In stark contrast to the fossil fuels sector,
the clean renewables sector:
• is far from saturated,
• produces an ever-increasing rate of return
for investors,
• is primed to produce economies of scale,
• can offer more jobs at better wages over a
longer term, and
• lends itself to accelerating efficiency gains.
So, why are so many smart people still
saying they favor the economics of oil? Two
reasons:
26
1. They are invested in the fossil-burning-
for-profits model and so don’t accurately
perceive the saturation problem;
2. They don’t understand the paradigm shift
and so view clean energy not as a rapidly
expanding market but as a feeble one.
It’s not presumptuous to make these
assertions about the anti-clean-energy crowd;
it’s giving the benefit of the doubt to people
who are not seeing the lay of the land as it is,
but rather as they are accustomed to hoping
it is. It is wishful thinking to hold that oil will
always be king and no better option will
replace it, wishful, that is, if you profit from
oil’s dominance. The same with coal.
We are running out of ways to extract coal
cheaply without literally blowing mountains
apart, wiping them off them map, which
carries very significant costs. Coal is an 18th-
century technology not optimized for our 21st
century needs. While employment from coal
steadily declines, the risks and costs of its
production mount, and coal-rich com-
munities continue to experience chronic
endemic poverty which the industry has been
unable to solve.
We are running out of easy access to oil; the
remaining reserves are trapped in un-
developed remote wilderness, behind high-
risk, low-yield extraction processes that
require major new dirty energy infrastructure
to be built. Their development will impede
investment in and development of better,
cleaner, more efficient alternatives. We can do
much better.
The fossil fuel saturation problem, known to
states like Texas as an ongoing “energy
emergency”, means we need to be actively
searching not only for alternative fuels, but
also for investment opportunities where we
can build in drivers of more generalized
prosperity, i.e. a restored and strengthened
middle class, and accelerating returns in
productive capacity.
The only way to achieve that is by building
a smart-grid-based distributed clean renew-
able-energy market.
27
"e Case for a Carbon Tax:Ge#ing Past Our Hang-ups to Effective Climate Policyby Shi-Ling Hsu
The following is an author’s précis for the
book, The Case for a Carbon Tax: Getting Past
Our Hang-ups to Effective Climate Policy,
published by Island Press.
The Case for a Carbon Tax sets out ten
reasons to favor a carbon tax over the
alternative policies of (1) government
subsidies, (2) "command-and-control" style
environmental regulation under the older
parts of the Clean Air Act, and (3) cap-and-
trade.
One: "Government is bad at picking win-
ners, and losers are good at picking govern-
ments." The source of this famous saying is
surprisingly hard to pinpoint. Its relevance to
climate policy is hard to miss. When faced
with a problem as large and daunting as
climate change, there is a temptation to
expect too much from governments. We
demand that governments actually solve the
problem, rather than create the conditions
under which a solution is found. In an era of
endless political campaigns and promises,
voters in democratic countries have gotten
accustomed to the idea that government
should play the role of "fixer." This is
mistaken thinking. Innovation in technology
to reduce green-house gas emissions is going
to have to come from the private sector. Above
all, innovation requires a price signal. The
whole point of a price signal is that it does
not pick a winner; it lets markets do that. An
appropriate price signal on the emissions of
greenhouse gases will unleash a competition
among innovators to come up with the best
and cheapest technologies to reduce
emissions.
Two: Economic efficiency. Not only do we
want a competition among innovators and
entrepreneurs finding ways to reduce
emissions, economic efficiency demands that
there be a fair competition. Without a "fair"
competition, it is not assured that the lowest
cost reductions will prevail. For example,
regulating under the Clean Air Act does not
set up a fair competition because in general,
the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
has been politically forced to regulate under
the Clean Air Act mostly by making
industries just do their best to reduce
pollution. There is nothing fair about letting
coal-fired power plants pollute just because
they tried their putative “best” to reduce their
pollution. For years, the default regulatory
option was to require that coal-fired power
plants install scrubbers to reduce sulfur
dioxide emissions. Alternative means of
reducing emissions have emerged that
suggest scrubbers are not particularly cost-
effective. Economic efficiency demands that
the ultimate arbiter of environmental
performance be the market, and not the
E.P.A.
Fundamentally, an economy facing 21st
century challenges must sort industries, top
to bottom, by carbon dioxide emissions. A
carbon tax does this. Especially in an era of
falling natural gas prices, many older, less
efficient coal-fired power plants cannot
survive a competition in which carbon dioxide
emissions are priced. This is precisely the
kind of sorting that cannot be done efficiently
by the Clean Air Act which, by commanding
28
and controlling, basically asks each industry
to try its best, with EPA's lenience and
attentiveness doled out in rough proportion to
each industry's political power. The simple
genius of a carbon tax is that it aggregates
disparate pieces of information throughout
the economy, transmitting a price signal at
every stage in which there is fossil fuel usage,
and transmitting it in proportion to the
carbon emissions of the production process.
Three: broader incentives to innovate. The
Canadian province of British Columbia has in
place a carbon tax of $30 per ton of carbon
dioxide. I was a resident of British Columbia
during the five-year phase-in period for the
B.C. carbon tax. In 2009, with the B.C.
carbon tax barely a year old, I undertook a
large home renovation to increase living
space. What surprised me was that my
contractor was very aware of the carbon tax,
and was able to tell me in very specific dollar
terms what the carbon tax meant for my
renovation project. He was thus able to
explain how much shorter the payback
periods were for energy-efficient options such
as high-efficiency furnaces and windows and
doors, solar water heating, and combined
water and space heating equipment. How did
a construction contractor become such an
expert on the effects of the carbon tax? He
had become an expert on the carbon tax was
that he already had clients like me who had
inquired and demanded that he do the
analysis. This would have been unlikely
under other systems with a less clear price
signal.
Incentivizing innovation will require a
broad price signal that ripples throughout the
economy in order to take advantage of as
many greenhouse gas reduction opportunities
as possible. The strength of a carbon tax is it
creates a broad, economy-wide price signal.
Greenhouse gas reduction opportunities are
diverse, and the only way to tap into all of
them is to have a broad price signal. Pricing
greenhouse gas emissions into energy prices
sends a price signal that ripples throughout
the entire economy, scrambling every single
business in a search for a lower carbon
footprint in the hopes that it can gain a price
advantage over competitors.
Furthermore, because of the nature of
regulating point sources of emissions,
regulation of greenhouse gas emissions under
the Clean Air Act can only be applied to a
handful of facilities. Although this handful of
facilities accounts for most of the greenhouse
gas emissions, they are a small fraction of the
number of facilities that emit. By regulating
under the Clean Air Act, we miss the
opportunity to tap into the entrepreneurial
energies of that vast majority of emitting
facilities.
Four: Deeper and steadier incentives to
innovate. Many have already made the
argument that command-and-control regula-
tion is inefficient and ineffective. The most
fundamental flaw of regulating greenhouse
gas emissions command-and-control style
under the Clean Air Act is that the price
signal favoring low-carbon or non-carbon
alternatives is one generated by an ad-
ministrative process, rather than a market
process. I do not revisit those arguments. The
economists have won the debate, and almost
everyone accepts that a price on carbon
dioxide emissions is needed.
While very limited government subsid-
ization of some research and development of
renewable and alternative technologies may
be warranted. But the most relevant choice is
29
between cap-and-trade and a carbon tax.
Cap-and-trade is an instrument whereby an
overall limit, or "cap," is set on total national
emissions, and emitters can trade amongst
themselves in mostly un-regulated market
transactions to allocate those emissions.
Although cap-and-trade and carbon taxes
both encourage innovation to reduce
emissions, the two are not equal in their
ability to induce innovation. There are at
least three ways in which a carbon tax will
better encourage innovation than a cap-and-
trade program. First, a carbon tax introduces
a steadier price signal than cap-and-trade.
Cap-and-trade sets the quantity of emissions,
but lets the price fluctuate according to
market demand. Investors interested in
lower-carbon or non-carbon alternatives
would rather not have price volatility. Second,
if a cap-and-trade program is successful in
encouraging innovation in greenhouse gas-
reducing technologies, the ironic effect is that
this innovation will reduce the price of
emissions permits and thereby reduce the
price incentive to innovate. A carbon tax, by
contrast, represents a continuing price signal
to find lower-carbon alternatives. Finally, if a
cap-and-trade program gives away emissions
permits instead of auctioning them—which
history suggests politicians would much
prefer—then emitters with these free permits
will have less incentive to innovate because
in-novation would reduce the value of those
emission permits. The free allocation of
allowances creates an asset in the hands of
emitters, something that does not happen
under a tax regime. The fact that innovation
could reduce the value of that asset is a
disincentive for those emitters to find cost-
saving innovations.
Five: carbon taxes do not subsidize the
formation of capital. People seem to think
that capital in the form of buildings, facilities,
and structures is an unambiguously good
thing. Most economists believe that capital
accounts for the difference in wealth between
developed countries and under-developed
countries. But capital has a downside: when
we discover that there is something harmful
or inefficient about the expensive capital we
have acquired, it can be very difficult to get
rid of that capital.
The whole problem of climate change
should have clued us in to this problem with
capital. One reason that addressing climate
change is so difficult is because the world has
trillions of dollars' worth of coal-fired power
plants that cannot be simply unplugged
overnight and replaced with other energy
sources. How did this happen? The line of
thinking that led to the accumulation of
excess capital went something like this:
cheap electricity is an unambiguously good
thing, because it lowers production costs and
generally makes life better for the general
populace. But cheap electricity requires
expensive capital, and so government as-
sistance to help form this capital must be a
good thing, too. Coal for electricity generation
has thus always been heavily subsidized,
enjoying numerous tax benefits. The sale of
coal itself can be eligible for taxation at a
lower rate or may be deducted from income
under a favorable "percentage depletion"
method, which allows a deduction that
exceeds the value of the coal itself. This has
all been in the name of cheap electricity, but
now we are stuck with all of this capital, and
the owners of this capital will vigorously
resist change that devalues their capital.
30
This specious line of thinking continues to
haunt energy policy today, as we dream up
even more ways to help the "right" tech-
nologies flourish, even those that maintain
our coal-related physical capital. Un-
believably, the Internal Revenue Code even
considers "refined coal"—coal that is treated
to have lower emissions—eligible for the
renewable energy production tax credit! Only
a lawyer could find such an audacious
interpretation of "renewable energy" plaus-
ible. A carbon tax is the only climate policy
that does not subsidize the formation of
capital.
Six: Respect for federalism. A carbon tax
is the one climate instrument that allows
individual states to truly pursue climate
policy without interference from the federal
government. There was a time when both
Congress and a handful of Western states—
those that were part of the "Western Climate
Initiative"—were pursuing cap-and-trade
programs in parallel. Cap-and-trade legis-
lation died on Capitol Hill, and all of the
states except California dropped out of the
Western Climate Initiative. But for a time,
there was some talk of how the two cap-and-
trade programs were going to be reconciled.
Why bother? Why not let states determine
for themselves if and how zealously they wish
to pursue climate policy? A carbon tax is the
one instrument that can be applied at the
state or federal level, or at both levels.
Furthermore, a properly-designed carbon tax
is compatible with other methods of green-
house gas control.
Seven: Carbon taxes are administratively
simpler. We have already dismissed Clean Air
Act regulation as poor climate policy.
Command-and-control regulation is ad-
ministratively difficult. It turns out that cap-
and-trade is also a headache. Whereas a
carbon tax draws on existing tax collection
procedures – such as those that already exist
at the gasoline pump – cap-and-trade will
require the development of a new agency
group to monitor emissions permit trades. In
the United States, which has already enjoyed,
at least by Washington standards, a fairly
smooth set-up and execution of the sulfur
dioxide cap-and-trade program, the costs of
setting up a greenhouse gas cap-and-trade
program would be manageable, but non-
trivial. A Congressional Budget Office report
estimated that a 2007 cap-and-trade bill that
passed the Senate Committee on Environ-
ment and Public Works would cost about
$1.7 billion from 2009 to 2013 to implement,
including the cost of hiring up to 400 new
employees. This is not a lot of money for the
federal government, but the United States is a
wealthy country with an agency with
experience in conducting cap-and-trade
programs. Not only would some countries
find a billion-dollar-plus price tag more
challenging, some would find the set-up
considerably more complicated. Several cases
of online thievery have cast some doubt on
the ability of even developed countries to
maintain market integrity for emissions
permits. By contrast, a carbon tax looks
administratively very much like the kinds of
sales taxes that even under-developed
countries are able to implement. A program
which has fewer administrative problems can
be implemented more quickly, thereby
addressing the problem of climate change
sooner.
Eight: revenue raising. Even small-
government libertarians would have to
concede that if the revenues from a carbon
31
tax were truly returned to taxpayers, taxing
greenhouse gas emissions is better than
taxing labor. In the United States, a carbon
tax of $30 per ton would generate $145
billion in annual revenue, which could
finance a ten percent cut in personal and
corporate income taxes, and then some. How
does an income tax cut sound to con-
servatives? Even if this is not pursued, cash-
strapped governments at many levels could
no doubt usefully restore funding to primary
education, health care, policing, infra-
structure, and other pressing needs that have
been deferred, or redistribute carbon tax
revenues only to the poorest individuals and
households, thereby preventing the carbon
tax from being regressive.
Nine: international coordination. Almost
every international treaty has sought to oblige
signatories to abide in a certain common code
of behavior. The Kyoto Protocol is an
exception. By acknowledging "common but
differentiated responsibilities," the Kyoto
Protocol sets out a schedule by which
developed countries must reduce their
emissions but developing countries do not.
The hope was that if the developed countries
took the first step, developing countries
would follow. This hope has failed spec-
tacularly.
The plain reality is that China and India
will not, in any time frame that could avoid
climate change, consider quantitative limits
on emissions as required by the cap-and-
trade programs that the Kyoto Protocol
seemed to contemplate. China and India are
likely to be more open, however, to a global
carbon tax. For one thing, governments get to
keep the proceeds from a carbon tax, so that
it does not smack of an externally imposed
mandate that intrudes onto sovereignty. Also,
a global carbon tax, insofar as it really looks
more like international treaties that have
been successfully negotiated in the past—in
which signatories all agree to do the same
thing—is a policy that is more likely than
Kyoto to gain the kind of international
agreement that will be needed to actually
solve the climate policy problem. No one
disputes that in order for greenhouse gas
emissions to be reduced, global cooperation is
required. A carbon tax stands a better chance
of achieving this than the alternatives.
Ten: Economic efficiency, again. The
world's most vibrant economies are fossil
fuel-powered. So fundamental is fossil fuel
combustion to economic health that it will
take a long time, and much willpower, to
sufficiently wean economies off of fossil fuels.
A widespread and sustained effort to ac-
complish this is like dieting: as anyone who
has ever been on a diet could tell you, it will
take long-term resolution and commitment.
Dieters will also be able to tell you that some
days are better than others, but long-term
habits are more important. A consistent
carbon tax, annually adjusted for inflation,
represents a long-term commitment. It is
superior to cap-and-trade because a cap
remains fixed no matter what happens in a
given year (cap-and-trade programs may
allow permit "banking" and "borrowing"
across years, but that would only imperfectly
simulate the flexibility offered by a carbon
tax). In economic downtimes, carbon dioxide
emissions fall; in those years having a "loose"
cap is a missed opportunity to reduce
emissions even more, and perhaps develop
some lower-carbon "habits." Carbon dioxide
emissions in Europe and in the United States
dropped precipitously in 2009, enough to
push these Kyoto signatories startlingly far
32
towards meeting their Kyoto commitments.
Such a time of depressed asset prices would
have been an excellent time to invest in
emissions reductions, but only a carbon tax
would have incentivized those investments,
not cap-and-trade.
What a carbon tax does, which cap-and-
trade and other alternatives do not, is to keep
up a consistent and persistent price signal. In
a year like 2009, the economic slowdown
would have destroyed all price incentives to
reduce carbon dioxide emissions. That would
have been a year of missed opportunities to
lock in some progress. Economic efficiency
demands that the opportunities to reduce
emissions be taken not just at the places
where emissions reductions are the cheapest,
but also when they are cheapest. A carbon
tax allows that to happen, whereas a cap-
and-trade program robotically demands the
same amount of emissions reduction, year
after year, no matter what the economic
circumstances. This is not economically
efficient.
Those are ten reasons for conservatives to
favor a carbon tax.
So why are carbon taxes so politically
unpopular? One reason is that we seem to
have a political allergy to anything with the
word "tax" in it. In fact, some research
suggests that if we were to label this policy a
"fee," people might be less likely to oppose it.
But euphemizing is not the answer. The
answer is to persist in making the plain-
spoken argument that if emissions reductions
are required, it will cost money. Carbon taxes
are the least costly way of achieving
emissions reductions. Politicians talking
down to the electorate only reinforce dumb
conventional "wisdoms." The dumb con-
ventional wisdom we must debunk is that we
can get something for nothing. This is the
hidden strategy for politicians that advocate
for broad government subsidies, command-
and-control regulation ("punishing the pol-
luter," eliding the fact that energy costs often
get passed on to consumers), and to some
extent cap-and-trade. There must be honest
and realistic talk about the increased energy
prices that everyone must pay, as well as the
economic and social consequences of failure
to act. The case must be also laid out for how
a carbon tax is the instrument that minimizes
that cost and minimizes governmental
interference.
Some are also concerned that carbon
taxes are regressive, because raising energy
and transportation costs would dispro-
portionately hurt poorer households, for
whom energy and transportation costs are a
larger fraction of their budget. But recycling
the revenues from a carbon tax can fix this. A
redistribution of just a fraction of carbon tax
revenues can make poor households whole.
Moreover, even without such a revenue
distribution targeting poor households, a
carbon tax would be, on the grand scale of
things, one of the smallest insults visited
upon the poorest Americans.
Reducing greenhouse gases will require
significant changes in the way that we
generate and consume electricity. Govern-
ments are not very good at orchestrating
these kinds of changes. Private enterprises
like Microsoft, Google, and Apple Computer
are very good at changing large-scale
behavior very quickly. Given that some very
quick and large-scale ramp-up in renewable
energy technologies is needed, the way to
support renewable energy is to tax all things
carbon, not try to subsidize things non-
33
carbon. Ultimately, trying to subsidize,
mandate, or otherwise prop up all things
non-carbon has this pushing-on-a-string
futility.
Fortunately, opposition to carbon taxes is
a mile wide but an inch deep. Resistance to
carbon taxes are based on broad but
superficial misperceptions which can be
broken down with persistent, simple, plain-
spoken messaging. The message that needs
to be conveyed is that all plans for reducing
emissions will cost money. Even if some
policies to reduce emissions do not obviously
cost money, ultimately people pay, be it as
taxpayer, automobile owner, electricity user,
or just a consumer of goods in a fossil-fuel-
powered economy. A "tax" only sounds worse
than everything else. In reality, a carbon tax
is the least costly way of reducing emissions,
especially when the revenues are recycled
back into the economy. A carbon tax offers
the most opportunities to reduce emissions,
giving society the chance to choose from the
widest variety of ways to reduce emissions,
and to choose the least costly ones. Finally, a
carbon tax is something that can be easily
and quickly deployed, because it can be
implemented much like a sales tax, making it
feasible for almost any country or any state or
province. A carbon tax is the best option for
reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The Author
Shi-Ling Hsu is Professor at the University of
British Columbia Faculty of Law. He has
served as Associate Professor at the George
Washington University Law School, Senior
Attorney and Economist for the Environ-
mental Law Institute and Deputy City
Attorney for the City and County of San
Francisco.
34
How Driving an Electric Car Freed Meby Ellie Whitney
Electric cars have changed radically since
1995, when I began driving my “E-car.” This
article is not intended to show the features of
electric cars today, but to illustrate the
attitudes of mind and spirit that lead people to
make major lifestyle changes for the benefit of
the environment. - E.W.
During the decade prior to the year 2000, I
became eager to change my way of life. I had
been a typical American consumer, with all
the luxuries that middle-class citizens
enjoyed. A single, working mom, I hadn’t
taken time to learn much about the effects
my purchasing, using, and disposal habits
might be exerting on the world around me.
My three children and full-time job teaching
at Florida State had occupied all of my
attention.
Power for the car came from 24 deep-cycle batteries: 8 under the hood, 8 under the rear seat, 8 under the trunk.
I had lived in cities for most of my life—
New York, Boston, Tokyo, St. Louis—and
when in 1974 I moved to a suburb outside
Tallahassee, Florida, I thought of it as “the
country.” My grassy lawn with well-attended
bird-feeders seemed a wilderness, and an
unimproved lot next door, overgrown with
pine trees, looked like a virgin forest.
Not until I was 50, with my children
launched on their own lives, did I take a real
vacation: I made a trip to a Costa Rican
rainforest with a team of adventurous
biologists. For two weeks we spent our days
out-of-doors, walking steep trails among
towering, vine-clad trees amongst the sounds
and signs of thousands of species of plants
and animals. By the time we returned to the
United States after only a little more than two
weeks, I had a new, deep appreciation of the
truly natural world and a desire to help
preserve it.
The awareness that arose from that trip
has never left me.
Later, I attended an international
conference on rainforest ecosystems and had
the opportunity to put my question to an
expert. “I’m just a mom, not an expert,” I told
him. What can I do to help preserve the
world’s rainforests?”
My disappointment in his response was
almost comical. Hoping to be told I should
live in a tent in a beautiful wilderness, and
follow some exotic bird around to learn its
habits, I was thrown on my heels when he
replied, “Help teach American consumers to
change their lifestyles.” But I could see his
point. We Americans are the most gobbly
consumers in the world: we use so much
energy and emit such volumes of heat-
trapping gases that we are accelerating the
disruption of the climate and inflicting
consequences on all civilizations and
ecosystems of the world. That needs to
change.
35
So I resolved to help in the way this expert
recommended, whatever it might cost me in
effort and personal energy. I decided to leap
into the 21st century as an all-green citizen,
with a solar home, an electric car, and zero
trash, only recycling.
To this end, I began conducting a sort of
lifestyle experiment. My object was twofold: to
see how lightly I could live on the earth, and
to try to attract other consumers into the
same ways of life by showing that they were
not burdensome but exciting and fun. I asked
for the privilege of writing weekly columns in
the local newspaper, the Tallahassee
Democrat. The paper was happy to take me
on, and promptly named me “The Everyday
Environmentalist.”
My columns began to appear on the 20th
birthday of Earth Day, in April, 1994 and ran
for six years. From the start, I promised
readers that I would try to make changes in
every aspect of my life from the ways I bought
things to the ways I used and disposed of
them. I pledged that I would report only on
changes I, myself, had made—a project in
which my bemused husband cooperated fully.
It did turn out to be fun, doing all this.
And nothing was more exciting than my
purchase and use of an electric car.
I did some research to find a car that
would be affordable, practical and safe. It had
to be reliable and repairable by ordinary
nearby garages at a reasonable price and I
had to be comfortable and confident driving
it. In return for those features, I vowed I
would be willing to face some obstacles, if
necessary. My reward would be the privilege
of driving more freely while producing less
global-warming gas than I had ever done
before. (Our city electricity was generated
from natural gas, which is less polluting than
coal, but it still emits carbon dioxide when
burned.) I intended to demonstrate, if true,
that the time for this kind of change had
arrived—that ordinary people like me could
make this choice without paying too high a
price.
I found such a car, custom-made, through
my friend Al Simpler, of Shelby Motors in
Tallahassee. The maker, Wilde EVolutions of
Arizona, bought a Taurus body, installed the
necessary electric innards, and delivered it to
me within eight weeks.
The E-car looked like any other car.
The price was higher that I’d ever paid for a
car—$25,000, but there was no 7-percent
sales tax on the car and I got a 10-percent
rebate on my income tax. The net price of the
car, then, was $25,000 minus $1,750 minus
$2,500, or $20,250 total, plus $1,000
shipping. I thought such a price might be
acceptable to other drivers who, like me,
wanted to make their life choices more green.
Tongue in cheek, I told readers:
I stopped for gas last week for the last time. Nostalgically, I bent over the gas cap and inhaled deeply.
“I’ll miss this,” I thought wistfully. “No more stops at gas stations. No more exhaust fumes. No more rumbling engine, no spark plugs, no muffler, no carburetor—how will I live without these things?”
Nonsense. I thought nothing of the kind.
36
My friend Al delivered the car on July 7. It
looked like a big monster to me after the little
Geo I’ve been driving for five years. I told
readers:
It’s a four-door, gleaming white Taurus with air conditioning, power steering, power brakes, electric windows—the works.
This car is serious. It wants to stand shoulder to shoulder with the standard Detroit cars. It wants to take its place in the Big Time.
“Do I really need all this?” I wondered. Vice Pres ident A l Gore ’ s comment echoed somewhere inside me, “Isn’t it ridiculous that each person must go from place to place surrounded by 3,000 pounds of steel?”
Another voice answered, “Yes, but that’s what our society demands we do. We have to travel major roads, even to get to our food.” Given that reality, maybe this was a good thing.
The E-car was powered by a small, very efficient and powerful airplane engine.
My first drive, taken with Al, was a surprise:
Al instructed me, “Just turn the key, as in a regular car.”
I did. Nothing happened. “It’s on,” he said.
I found it unnerving, not to know when the car was “on.”
“Now turn on the air conditioner,” said Simpler. I did, and cool air flowed over me immediately, together with the sound of the fan. That was nice.
Then we glided away, shifting gears, accelerating and braking as in a “regular” car.
Soon Al pronounced me fit to drive and left me with my new vehicle plugged in and charging in the carport.
The change already felt momentous. I had
both large thoughts (“Is this the beginning of
a new millennium for everyone?”) and small
ones (“I wonder how fast it will charge?”).
Change, even beneficial change, is stressful.
I told readers:
In the morning, the meter on the dashboard reported that the battery was full. Still, I hesitated long before heading for the store. I feared that something wouldn’t work, and that I wouldn’t know what to do about it.
Finally I told myself, “Well, you can always get it towed. You’ve done that with gas-powered cars, remember?” I desperately wanted nothing to go wrong.
Nothing did. I drove to the store and parked as I always have. Then as I walked the aisles picking out cereals, breads and juices, I found myself holding my breath. “Nobody’s looking at me!” I thought. “You’d think they’d notice this creature from another planet (century?) shopping in this store.” But what was there to see?
Nor did the bagger notice when he put the bags in the truck. I breathed a little easier.
I’m home again. The car is charging again. I can do this. It isn’t all that different. Yet something big has happened and my world is not the same.
I drove the E-car exclusively for more than
five years. I learned that its range on a full
charge was about 50 miles, exactly the
distance to a house at the coast where I
stayed on weekends. To make sure not to run
out of “juice,” I stopped halfway there at
Posey’s Restaurant to eat. They freely let me
use their outside outlet so that I could gain
10 extra amp-hours in case of need. I paid 25
cents for this, which more than covered their
cost.
37
Elsewhere, if I was running low on energy,
I asked grocery stores or convenience stores
to let me plug in for a while. Everyone was delighted to help me, and fascinated by the
car. The only place I was ever refused a charge was at a gas station. “We don’t do
that,” they said.
But I seldom ran low enough on power to need a charge away from home. And since I
charged the car at night when electricity rates were lowest, I figured that I was paying an
amazingly low rate for my “gas”—about 3
cents a mile for city driving; 2 cents for driving on the highway.
Five years after I bought the E-car, many changes took place in my personal life. First
my parents, then my husband died, and I no
longer wanted to live in solitude in a country home. I took a small apartment in the city
where I could not house the car, so I donated it to a department at Florida A&M University
where students were studying alternative
transportation. I resumed driving a gas-powered, fuel-efficient car, a Toyota Camry.
What a come-down. Within two weeks after buying the Camry, I ran out of gas on the
road. I’d forgotten about having to refill the
tank. Later, in gas stations, I had to learn to operate the fuel pumps, which were equipped
with charge-card slots I had never seen before.
Later still, I retired. I have moved to New
Jersey to be near my daughter’s family, and I drive a Toyota Prius, which averages 50 miles
to the gallon of gas. But I still dream of having an all-electric car in a world where
there will be charging meters everywhere—in
supermarkets, malls, restaurants and work-places will have charging meters.
I also hope that gasoline prices will rise steeply—in concert with a rapid decline in the
prices of clean energy resources. Such a
change can take place without hurting
American wallets if Congress puts in place a
carbon fee-and-dividend system such as the “Save Our Climate Act,” H.R. 3242, which is
now awaiting action in the U.S. House of Representatives. We would benefit militarily,
economically, environmentally, and especially
because we would have a planetary future to look forward to.
On finding the electrical outlet under the gas cap, admirers would almost invariably say,
“Cool!”
The Author
Ellie Whitney grew up in New York City and earned her bachelor’s degree at Harvard University and her doctorate in biology at Washington University, St. Louis. She lived in Tallahassee, Florida for 35 years until retirement, living in a solar home and driving an all-electric car. Besides writing many college textbooks on nutrition, health, and the environment, she wrote weekly columns as the Tallahassee Democrat’s “Everyday Environmentalist,” helping citizens learn to live lightly on the Earth. She has followed climate change trends for more than 30 years and now volunteers for the Citizens Climate Lobby.
38
It is not the policy of the Hot Spring Network or the Hot Spring uarterly to endorse political candidates. Neither project has a partisan or ideological bias. But we would like to highlight the following message, by the following independent candidate for US Senate, because his project is so much like ours: he not only seeks to promote significant change, through the legislation and the public service he commits himself to; he seeks to promote change through citizenship and personal engagement. ese are part of what it means to be involved in Deep Green economics: promoting mutual thriving sustainably, through all of our actions, policies and pursuits.
A MESSAGE FROM INDEPENDENT SENATE CANDIDATE BILL BARRON
My name is Bill Barron. I am an unaffiliated candidate seeking to represent Utah in the United States Senate. I am focused on the most urgent issue of our time, human-caused climate change. We face a critical moment in our history, where our action or inaction will dictate what our children and future generations a"er them will face. It is time to unite as human beings and acknowledge the implications on our natural world if we continue burning fossil fuels at the rate we are today.
#ere is a direct and transparent solution to this issue, which would provide bene$ts to our air and water quality, human health, our economy and the creation of much needed jobs. It is called carbon fee and dividend. #is legislative proposal would place a steadily increasing fee on carbon emissions at the source -at the mine, well or port of entry - with 100% of the revenue returned to households. #is fee on carbon would account for the externalized costs of burning fossil fuels, with the revenue returned equitably to American households as a dividend check. #is type of legislation would drive a smooth, nationwide transition to clean and renewable energy. It would: accelerate our transition away from fossil fuels, improve our air and water quality, while reducing health care costs, provide the incentive for our economy to grow toward innovation, ingenuity, and efficiency, and would not increase the size of the government.
I am compelled to run for US Senate because the time to be effective is now! Climate change is happening and scientists con$rm that we are a major cause. We can address this issue with a federal legislative solution that matches the scale of the problem. I ask you to engage in the political process as individuals and let’s create the political will for a future that affirms the best interests of our children and coming generations. #is is a moral and ethical issue, not a political one.
Our country is facing many challenges, but when it comes right down to it, if we don’t address human-caused climate change, all other issues will pale in comparison.
Bill Barron is running as an independent for U.S. Senate in 2012. Bill is forty-!ve years old and proud father of a 9 year old daughter; a carpenter and ski patroller at Alta who believes that there needs to be a political revolution dedicated to the urgency to address climate change on behalf of the earth and for the sake of future generations.
To learn more about Bill Barron, visit BarronforUSSenate.com
A paradigm is the predominant way of dealing with the
shape and the nature of reality, and represents the
consensus of human consciousness within a given scope
of thought, skill or inquiry. A paradigm shift is a
moment in which the entire edifice of presumed
meaning is altered, simultaneously, because the shape
of the universe itself, with respect to the point in
question, has been discovered to be different. New
insights flow from a paradigm shift instantaneously, and
what was previously not understood to be possible
becomes not only possible, but the focus of inquiry. The
Internet constitutes a paradigm-shift in human
communication, for instance. How we envision our
relationship to people around the world is, with the
Internet, fundamentally altered. The paradigm shift
allows us to solve problems we could not otherwise
envision a way to solve. The Hot Spring Network is
committed to “hunting the paradigm shift” through
collaborative inquiry, creative critical thinking and
technological invention.
Cnut the Great & a Vision for Mitigating Climate Change: What About Tomorrow?by Jan Dash, PhD
This essay was originally prepared as a talk to be given by Dr. Dash, in an effort to educate the public and policy-makers about the truth, regarding the ongoing process of global climate destabilization, and how our use of energy relates to the crisis, and to the solutions. This version was produced by the author in August, 2012.
Here are two contrasting future climate
visions. Imagine this. In Positive Vision #1 we
act vigorously to mitigate climate change. Our
country is thriving on renewable, clean
energy while everyone’s life and health is
improved in a sustainable economy. On the
other hand, in Business as Usual Vision #2
we do not act vigorously to mitigate climate
change. We are dependent on fossil fuels
increasing global warming, and which are
moreover increasingly difficult to extract,
blowing up mountaintops and building
dangerous pipelines. What are the con-
sequences of these two visions for climate
and why should we care? I like to use this
metaphor: The world is like a car stalled on
the train track, and the climate train is
barreling down on us. It is close and it is fast.
Business As Usual Vision #2 says let’s deny
there is a problem at all. Let’s just sit there.
Instead, I say: let’s follow Positive Vision #1
and move the car.
Cnut the Great was once king of
Denmark, England, Norway, and parts of
Sweden. Cnut was reported “to have set his
throne by the sea shore and commanded the
tide to halt and not wet his feet and robes.
Yet continuing to rise as usual [the tide]
dashed over his feet and legs without respect
to his royal person. Then the king leapt
backwards, saying: 'Let all men know how
empty and worthless is the power of kings,
for there is none worthy of the name, but He
whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal
laws.' “ If Cnut were alive today I believe that
he would be working to achieve Positive
Vision #1.
One thousand years later in 2012, ignoring
Cnut and the laws of climate science physics,
the legislature of North Carolina passed a law
forbidding consideration of scientifically
projected sea level rise. In contrast, the U.S.
Navy runs scenarios for a rise of 3 to 6 feet in
sea level by 2100. If future higher sea levels
accompanied by extreme weather events
devastate the North Carolina coast, the folly
of its legislators will be apparent.
But North Carolina is just the tip of the
iceberg. Most of the Republican Party, in
lockstep, now ignores the best mainstream
scientific evidence on climate. This includes
John McCain, who once sponsored climate
legislation. Fox News, the Wall Street
Journal, right-wing commentators and
politicians bark an incessant and un-
precedented attack on climate science,
distorting or denying the science and
misinforming the public. Consumers of this
disinformation can repeat fal lacious
contrarian talking points without even being
aware of the facts of mainstream climate
science. Even some brilliant people are
misled.
42
Some climate scientists are attacked by the
right wing and subjected to investigations.
Some scientists have received emails from
people inflamed by right wing disinformation
containing thinly veiled death threats.
Efforts to deal with the risks of climate
change, from renewable energy to con-
servation efforts, are also attacked by the
right wing. Subsidies for fossil fuels are
welcomed. While direct and indirect subsidies
for fossil fuels (including public roads) are
huge, any subsidies for renewable energy are
attacked.
These attacks are backed by the fossil fuel
industry, whose profits are threatened and
who I believe are afraid of being accused of
climate change liability, plus libertarian think
tanks that dislike government action. One of
the worst of these is the Heartland Institute,
which defends smoking. This is actually not
surprising, since the same tactics and some
of the same people railing against climate
science previously tried to cast doubt on the
science that exposed harmful effects of
smoking.
These people oppose Positive Vision #1.
They deny the climate problem exists. They
deny the findings of mainstream climate
science. They cling to Vision #2, Business as
Usual.
Five years ago the International Panel on
Climate Change or IPCC and Al Gore shared
a Nobel Prize for work on climate change. The
discussion then was on action—attempts to
mitigate and when necessary adapt to climate
change. That is where the discussion should
be now. We cannot allow the disinformation
campaign to derail us.
We need Positive Vision #1, acting to
mitigate the climate problem.
So what is the climate problem?
It is scientifically clear that the global
warming trend of climate change since 1975
exists. It is scientifically clear that this global
warming is mostly due to humans consuming
fossil fuels. It is scientifically clear that the
impacts of global warming and climate
change are starting to be observed now, will
be increasingly serious if we do not act
sufficiently, and will be overwhelmingly
negative.
Climate change is the biggest ethical and
moral problem of our times. It is also the
biggest survivability problem of our times.
The climate problem is humanity's problem.
Let’s start with the Business as Usual
Vision #2, where we do not take action. In the
metaphor, these people deny the climate train
even exists. Their denial and hostility leaves
the car on the train tracks. What are the
consequences as described by mainstream
research?
The poorest and weakest, those who did
the least to cause the climate problem, will be
those who will suffer the most. However we
all will be severely affected, including right
here in the United States. There will be no
safe haven and no place to hide.
Our grandchildren and other future
generations not yet born, who did nothing to
cause the climate problem, will be those who
will suffer the most.
Is saying this, as the right wing puts it,
being alarmist? I certainly hope so. I want
people to be alarmed. There is good reason to
43
be alarmed. As a former physics professor
and a current risk manager, I feel responsible
for telling as many people who will listen
about the dangers and risks of climate
change, and urge people to stand up and act
on climate change.
The U.S. Defense Department certainly
seems alarmed, deeming climate change a US
national security threat in its 2010
Quadrennial Defense Review. Reports from
reputable sources—laboratories and uni-
versities—come in every week regarding some
alarming aspect of the impacts of climate
change that will increasingly affect us and
our children and our grandchildren.
In fact I am here speaking to you today
because of my grandson. What will climate
change bring for him and for his children and
grandchildren who will see the year 2100, if
not enough mitigation action occurs? What
about children you know and their children?
I am alarmed at the prospects. Will they be
hungry? Thirsty? Safe? Will unmitigated
climate change bring disasters that will hurt
them?
Of course there have always been disasters
due to natural causes. But global warming
and climate change make natural problems
worse. The effects of global warming and
climate change are being observed now.
However, today’s impacts due to climate
change are only a faint rumbling of the
alarming impacts expected in the future.
Climate disinformers minimize or ignore
climate risk. But here is what reliable sources
say that climate change will increasingly do if
we do not mitigate sufficiently:
• Crops will increasingly wither and die under
the expected increasing drought and heat,
plus insects—responding to warmer tem-
peratures—invading from the south. Ocean
acidification resulting from absorbed carbon
dioxide will increasingly threaten the ocean
food chain from algae to fish. Food
shortages will become common worldwide.
• Most glaciers and snow packs, along with
many aquifers and fresh water sources, on
which billions depend, will decrease,
implying massive water shortages.
• Wars over food and water will increase,
threatening peace.
• From the medical journal Lancet: "Climate
change is the biggest global health threat of
the 21st century. Effects of climate change
on health will affect most populations in the
next decades and put the lives and
wellbeing of billions of people at increased
risk."
• Most cities near the sea will suffer
infrastructure damage, and mass climate
migrations in the millions are expected to
occur from those displaced, destabilizing
societies.
• Animal and plant extinctions will be
unprecedented since the asteroid killed off
the dinosaurs, threatening the balance of
nature and the interdependent web, on
which we all depend.
• Extreme weather events will increase in
impact. Hurricanes will become more
intense. Extreme fires will become more
common. Extreme heat waves will become
more common. Extreme droughts will
become more common. Today’s extreme
44
weather event will be tomorrow’s average
weather event.
• Some governments will face destabilization
with likely losses of civil liberties. Terrorism
will increase.
• One more thing. I have been doing finance
risk management professionally for 25
years. It is my opinion that the inherent
fragility of economic and financial systems
with the added pressure from impacts of
climate change may collapse these systems
worldwide and completely.
What about Positive Vision #1, where we act
vigorously to mitigate climate change and
adapt to it when necessary? In this vision we
move the car out of the way of the speeding
climate train. In Positive Vision #1 the worst
dangers of climate change are alleviated. In
this vision the goals we care about and the
principles we have become possible to
achieve. This is the vision we want.
The best framework for acting on climate
change is risk management. We deal with a
variety of risks every day and we hedge
against risk, using insurance for example.
Positive Vision #1 is a risk management
vision. The Business as Usual Vision #2 does
not want to understand climate risk
management.
As a finance risk manager, I am very
familiar with people who follow Business as
Usual Vision #2. These include shortsighted
traders who scorn serious risk management
and who regularly blow up. The last one to
receive notoriety was the London Whale at JP
Morgan who recently lost billions of dollars;
the exact amount is not known.
The consequences of not performing
robust risk management are much more
serious for climate than for finance, but the
basic idea is the same.
Dealing with risk, the analog of buying
insurance, costs money. Not dealing with risk
but being hit with the consequences is short
sighted and can cost much more money.
Ignoring the eventual costs of climate change
is unwise. Not dealing with risk will increase
human suffering.
It is important to know that there is no
silver bullet to resolve the climate problem.
We will need a portfolio of risk management
actions in mitigation and adaptation. Climate
deniers maximize climate mitigation cost
estimates. However a lot of ef fective
mitigation can be done without much
economic hardship, and opportunities will
abound for new paradigms in energy and
efficiency, provided we start seriously doing
mitigation now. Action to develop renewable
energy provides jobs and could help improve
the economy besides eventually replace fossil
fuels, providing a power ful force for
mitigating global warming. Some positive
action is now underway. This is good. It is not
enough.
What part can we play to help achieve
Positive Vision #1? Many of us are concerned
with social justice issues. But no issue can
have a long-term solution without parallel
consideration of a solution to climate change.
• Consider immigration. Studies show that
Mexico and South America wil l be
devastatingly impacted by climate change,
implying millions more immigrants coming
into the US.
45
• If your issue is water rights, think of the
effect of a bad drought, prolonged by
climate change, on thirsty people, on a
thirsty child.
• If you are working on women's rights,
consider that climate change is expected to
impact women and children the hardest.
• If you are working with hungry people,
imagine the increase in distress when food
prices go through the roof as climate-
change-enhanced drought decimates crops
in the US Midwest.
Climate change should be on everybody’s
front page.
Here are some concrete suggestions from
w h i c h t o c h o o s e t o i n c r e a s e y o u r
participation. Form Climate Action Teams.
Plan climate related events. Leverage from a
letter to the editor on climate is large. Join
with other groups active in climate, whether
religious or social or political.
For example, the Citizen’s Climate Lobby is
a focused group that is actively promoting a
revenue-neutral carbon tax with refunds or
dividends paid back to people, who come out
ahead if they use less energy.
Scientists (and there are many of you
already informed) can become better informed on climate science and the
distracting pseudo-science disinformation
campaign (for more details, see the appendix).
You could be leaders in helping others to
understand the climate issues.
Here are more suggestions. Some cities
have Green Teams; sign up. Support renew-
able energy projects. Support conservation
projects. Support energy efficiency projects.
Support research on new energies, including
advanced biofuels (not ethanol), and
including fusion energy. Support the
Environmental Protection Agency EPA in its
carbon regulation efforts under the Clean Air
Act. Support politicians who act on climate.
Support the Regional Greenhouse Gas
Initiative, or RGGI. Support technology
transfer to other countries for renewable
energy so all can develop in a sustainable
fashion. Support the process to develop and
rat i fy a long-term fa ir and b inding
international climate treaty. Help create the
political will for a livable climate.
Financial support of institutions active in
mitigating climate and financial support of
climate action projects would be a powerful
statement.
For those doing good work on other issues,
think of integrating climate change into that
work. Look through a c l imate lens.
Understand how climate change affects your
issue.
Some information sources are the UU-UNO
Cl imate Porta l (see f l ier ) , Skept ica l
Science.com (with one-liner responses to
contrarian fallacies), and the Citizen’s
Climate Lobby; the web addresses are in the
hard copy of this talk, along with an appendix
with information about contrarians. Prof.
Michael Mann's great new book “The Hockey
Stick and the Climate Wars” has details.
An excellent resource is the Climate
Science Rapid Response Team that has
contacts with over 100 real climate scientists
to provide reliable scientific information to
media inquiries by journalists.
46
What’s the bottom line? The dangers of
global warming and climate change are
becoming more visible. We need to act on
climate now with Positive Vision #1. It is late
but it’s not too late. We need to be optimistic.
There is no alternative. In acting to mitigate
climate change, we can make the world a
better and safer place for us, for our fellow
human beings, and for our descendants. We
all can help.
YOU can help.
Thank you.
Appendix
The climate contrarians / deniers / faux skeptics: What you need to know
A few maverick climatologists, some scientists
speaking out of their fields of expertise, and
others with no credentials have politicized
climate science, providing fodder for the
climate disinformation media machine. The
fossil fuel industry, right-wing media, and
libertarian think tanks often pay these
people. One of the most color ful is
Christopher Monckton, who has a British
accent but no scientific credentials at all, who
gives talks for right-wing groups grotesquely
distorting climate science, and who was an
"expert witness" on climate for Congressional
Republicans. Usually contrarian papers are
low quality and are not published, or are
published in obscure journals. Some
published contrarian papers left a trail
littered with abuse of peer review, editor
resignations, and even plagiarism.
With few exceptions, climate deniers and
right-wing denier media use pseudo scientific
tricks, rather like prosecuting attorneys,
grasping at straws. Many deniers practice the
pseudoscience of scientific form without real
content, what the famous physicist Richard
Feynman called Cargo Cult Science. Common
violations of scientific practice and scientific
ethics by contrarians include unrepre-
sentative cherry picking of data, demands of
unattainable precision from mainstream
science, advancing alternate conjectures for
which the evidence is at best flimsy, pushing
irrelevant red herring assertions, falsely
generalizing from isolated unrepresentative
cases, ignoring contrary evidence, making
bumbl ing mathemat ica l er rors , and
misquoting mainstream science. One
particularly ludicrous claim by contrarians is
identifying themselves with Galileo. Con-
trarians generally do not admit mistakes. The
contrarian media concocts false accusations
of climate science, of which contrarians
themselves are guilty. The untrained public
cannot tell the difference.
Selected stolen emails of climate scientists
with no significance were quoted out of
context and made into an industry of
propaganda about the so-called and dis-
credited "Climate gate"; numerous inves-
tigations concluded there was nothing
actually wrong.
An error on one obscure page in the middle
of 3,000 pages of three 2007 IPCC scientific
reports was blown out of proportion and used
to attack the whole IPCC institution and
climate science itself.
What about proof, uncertainty, and action?
Climate deniers mischaracterize science by
47
demanding “proof". Actually, science never
“proves” anything. Science uses mathematics
but science deals with the real world. There
will always be some uncertainty about
something. However uncertainty must not
imply inaction. We generally never demand
"proof" before acting; otherwise we would
never do anything. Indeed uncertainty implies
risk. Risk management deals with un-
certainty. After all, things can, and often do,
turn out much worse than expected. Climate
deniers minimize climate risk and in the
same breath overemphasize uncertainty. The
actual uncertainty is whether future climate
impacts will be really bad or a disaster for
civilization.
What about statistics and action?
Technically, some attributions of climate
impacts, to extreme weather for example, can
only be statistically estimated. This does not
mean the absence of danger and it does not
mean we should not act. After all, negative
effects of smoking are also statistically
estimated, and we act against smoking. We
can say more. Global warming increases the
probability for extreme weather generally for
the simple reason that warming puts more
energy into the weather system, making
weather act like it’s on steroids.
References
UU-UNO Climate Portal
www.climate.uu-uno.org
Skeptical Science
http://www.skepticalscience.com/
argument.php
Citizens Climate Lobby
http://www.citizensclimatelobby.org/
The Author
Jan Dash has a PhD in theoretical physics
from UC Berkeley, and published over 50
papers in scientific journals. He was
Directeur de Recherche at the Centre de
Physique Théorique CNRS in Marseille,
France. He is currently Visiting Research
Scholar at Fordham University and Adjunct
Professor at the Courant Institute NYU. Jan
is the UU-UNO Climate Initiative Chair and
Managing Editor of their Climate Portal at
http://cl imate.uu-uno.org/. He is a
Matchmaker for the Climate Science Rapid
Response Team whose goal is to provide
authoritative scientific answers to media
questions. Jan is the author of the popular
“one-liner” responses to climate contrarian/
denier/faux-skeptic fallacies. He was the
Editor of the Climate Statement Summary
and Recommendations to Governments of the
UN Committee on Sustainable Development
(Co-NGO, NY), delivered to leaders at the
Copenhagen, Cancun, and Durban Climate
Conferences. Relevant to the economic
impacts of global warming, Jan has worked
for 25 years in quantitative risk management
at various financial institutions, and wrote a
book on the subject.
Note: The ideas expressed in this essay are those of the author, without implication of endorsement by any of the above institutions. I thank the many people who have helped me understand climate change and how to communicate the issues.
48
!e Last Pack of Cigare"esby Capt. Wayne Porter, USN *
* The views expressed are those of the author
and do not represent the official views or
policy of the Department of Defense or the
Naval Postgraduate School.
At the beginning of this century, we
Americans find ourselves at an inflection
point in history, facing a complex and
uncertain strategic environment charac-
terized by increasing market and cultural
interdependence and competition for finite
resources—energy, minerals, food, and water.
This is a point Michael Klare stresses in his
new book, The Race for What’s Left. But
perhaps more significantly, I believe we are at
a Darwinian moment for civilization, one that
is full of opportunity if we have the
wherewithal and determination to seize it by
adapting to our changing environment. In
essence, we are outliving the usefulness of
carbon-based fuels as an engine for the global
economy, and we need to seek a more
sustainable model of economic growth. It is
as if we are breathlessly racing the rest of the
world for the last pack of cigarettes, with little
regard for the longer term consequences of
that addict ion. America ’s cont inued
credibility as a global leader hinges on our
willingness to accept the challenge of creating
a new model of prosperity and security in an
interconnected world.
A few months ago I was invited by the
environmental group, E3G, in London, to
accompany a small delegation from the Office
of the Secretary of Defense and the Center for
Naval Analysis on a “road show” in northern
Europe to discuss issues of environmental
and energy security with interested political,
military and academic groups. Our meetings
included discussions with German and
European Union Parliamentarians and think
tank representatives in Berlin, with civilian
and military NATO and EU representatives in
Brussels, and with high-level, international
participants in the British Foreign and
Commonwealth Office-hosted “Climate
Security in the 21st Century” conference at
Lancaster House in London. More recently, I
moderated the Global Conference on Oceans,
Climate and Security in Boston at the
University of Massachusetts. Secretary of the
Navy, Ray Mabus, accepted an award and
delivered an inspiring address at this event.
I found these events both encouraging and
distressing.
In both the meetings in Europe and the
discussions in Boston, I was encouraged by
the level of concern expressed in the need to
address the phenomena of environmental and
meteorological changes that are impacting
our planet—perhaps not an unexpected
perspective from this select group of
participants. But I was also struck by the
apparent lack of awareness that climato-
logical change and diminishing resources—
through increasing fuel prices, failing
agricultural policies, and water scarcity—
have already manifested themselves in
virtually every aspect of our strategic
environment, and that “climate change,” or
perhaps more accurately, anthropogenic
atmospheric and environmental change, is
49
only an effect of a larger problem, rather than
the cause of these manifestations.
Finally, I was distressed by the apparent
hyper-focus on security concerns and the
threat they represent. Little regard was given,
for example, to opportunities to address what
many consider to be the underlying cause of
these conditions and manifestations.
Throughout the course of our history,
Americans have excelled across the spectrum
of human endeavor through fair competition,
innovation and entrepreneurial spirit. But
we should not lose sight that the key
ingredients of this legacy were hard work and
self-confidence. In a world whose population
may reach nine billion by 2050, we must
demonstrate our exceptionalism by forging a
path to sustainable economic growth and
security. It’s time we retool the education
and job training needed to create a new
model of growth, one based on clean and
renewable (and reusable) resources: energy in
addition to food, water and minerals. Darwin
stressed the importance of adaptation and
strength gained through competition. As a
species we need to evolve along with our
environment. For those with vision, this
represents an opportunity rather than a
threat. For instance, why not explore the
development of industrial clusters in the
United States to serve as centers for
international investment and cooperation in
leading edge technologies and manufacturing
associated with clean, renewable energy,
sustainable agricultural and aquaculture
development, scrap metal recycling, and
water treatment and management? I am
currently involved with a project in Salinas,
California that is attempting to do just that.
With strong and visionary leadership,
Americans can prove the efficacy of the
values and free market ideology upon which
our nation was founded. I am proud of the
supporting role the Department of Defense is
playing in the pursuit of cleaner, sustainable
sources of energy and energy efficiency. But
this transformation cannot, and should not
be, a military-led effort. The reinvigoration of
our economy and manufacturing base—as
well as the awareness that fair competition
can result in multiple winners, rather than a
single winner and multiple losers—must
confidently begin within our free market
system. We need to engage American citizens
in an honest dialogue that focuses on the
challenges and opportunities of today’s
strategic environment and encourage them to
generate a new, sustainable legacy of
greatness.
The Author
Captain Wayne Porter, USN, was previously
assigned to the Office of the Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs, serving as a Special Assistant to
ADM Mullen for Strategy and is currently
serving as the Chair for Systemic Strategy
and Comdplexity at Naval Postgraduate
School. CAPT Porter and Col Mark Mykleby,
USMC (ret) are co-authors of “A National
Strategic Narrative” released by the Woodrow
Wilson Center for International Scholars.
For more information on the National
Strategic Narrative, visit:
www.nationalstrategicnarrative.org
50
!e Future is Not Simplicity, but Complexity, Be"er Understood & Managed by Joseph Robertson
A version of the following article first appeared
on The Hot Spring Network, on November 12,
2008. It appears in this inaugural edition of
The Hot Spring Quarterly to illustrate the
essential idea that we can do better if we
acknowledge the complex nature of lived
experience, and then work together within the
truth of our world to improve the outcomes
most likely to occur at the human scale.
Complexity is not an outlandish tendency of
troubled souls and pretentious intellects, as
so many who run from it like to make believe;
it is the basic state of nature as we know it.
The more we discover, the more certain we
can be of this: even elemental particles are
less solid than they seem, behaving like
tightly bound arrangements of impenetrable,
irreducible spherical bodies, they apparently
achieve this physics by behaving like
something they are not (now widely accepted
in particle physics, “string theory” proposes
that elemental particles are actually 2-
dimensional vibrating “strings” whose
vibration causes them to interact as if they
were not strings at all).
The human body is an astonishingly
complex organism, programming with viral
code (DNA) the arrangement, development
and physical or chemical task assigned to
each cell, organ and extremity. The brain is
so complex, we can only begin to grasp it as
“circuitry”, though it processes information
through chemical processes that allow it to
achieve many millions of times more
computational capacity than even the most
advanced neural networks. Consciousness is
part of this, or is the result of this, but we
can say almost nothing with certainty about
how consciousness itself arises. We can
describe what we witness, or what we think
we are witnessing, but we cannot replicate
the process by which the conscious mind
arises from the background noise of material,
chemical and energetic interrelationship.
For many, the mystical or spiritual
approach still yields the best explanation: a
force more powerful than the sum of all
things, a conscious creator, a God, an energy
field that pervades and unites all other
phenomena. Jean-Luc Marion calls it the
saturated phenomenon: that reality so vast it
could never be approached by human
understanding. That infinite vastness means
the human intellect is quickly saturated and
overwhelmed by all the lesser component
phenomena. The human intellect is, then,
limited by time and mortality, by the laws of
physics, which prevent simultaneous multi-
focal conscious presence—being in two places
at once—and so cannot possibly acquire
enough information to even initiate a viable
definition of what lies beyond saturation.
The mystical road to understanding
complexity takes us, eventually, if we are
honest, to Marion’s problem of saturation.
That said, we now understand that simple
complexities abound, even within reach of
our limited phenomenological potential: five
senses feed into one consciousness, which
also in optimal conditions absorbs infor-
51
mation through language, through text, by
way of human gestures, settings, emotions,
by fearing and desiring, by approaching or
getting distance from an object of its
attention, by creating, by dissecting, by
appreciating or by competing with other
realities. The depth of that “other reality”, the
reality of the vast multiplicity of otherness,
existing “out there”, but also deep within the
basic structure of our body, our physical
existence, our chemical awareness of self,
that complexity is the lifeblood of what makes
being human more interesting to us than
being a mass of granite.
In this light, complexity is really a funda-
mental truth for us all, and as such is
increasingly a right of every conscious
individual. We are entitled to experience, to
seek to know, to indulge in and to express
complexity, entitled because complexity is
what the human life is made of. Simplicity, or
the “simple life” as it is often called, a life
away from the chaos of big cities, even the
aesthetics of “clean edges” or a so-called
minimalist style, are all complexities designed
by the individual or by human surroundings,
to indulge an aspect of our humanity that we
prize above others.
In the complex and intertwined human
relationships that comprise today’s global
village, in friendships that exist across far
borders, as with diplomatic negotiations, we
can find there is something deeper and more
true, more accurately applicable to the
human element in that connection, in the
contradictions, in the vast terrain of “gray
area”, in the relational vortex that is neither
black-and-white nor non-negotiable. We find
that one moment’s staple truth is another
moment’s straightjacket, that we evolve, not
just as a species, but as individual spirits, to
consume and to make contact with an ever-
broader range of information, not so we can
be corrupted and post-modernized, but so we
can better adapt to environmental factors,
carry out the natural imperative of survival
and procreation, and devote the power of our
conscious attention to the vitally important
human work of forestalling unnecessary
depletion and unraveling of prized stabilities
within a hotbed of relentless self-overturning.
Natural ecosystems depend upon a be-
wildering degree of complexity to remain
dynamic, adaptable, resilient. The degree of
elasticity in an ecosystem—its ability to
absorb harmful interactions or infusions of
matter or energy—determines its “fitness” for
survival in the wilds of geological changes
over time. Climate variations and intrusive
organisms can upend a seemingly balanced
and harmonious ecosystem suddenly, leading
to disaster for its most habitat-dependent
species; the degree of biodiversity, of food-
web complexity, of climate-elastic charac-
teristics, determines the long-term viability of
an ecosystem, and by extension the
possibility for relative homeostasis in
surrounding ecosystems or the broader
natural environment.
The degree of elasticity available in a given
context also affects directly how human
civilization is able to interact with the natural
environment. Where monoculture cropping
exists—meaning only one variety of a given
species of plant is cultivated—an entire
agricultural economy can be in danger of
sudden collapse, as happened in Ireland in
the 19th century, due to its dependence on a
52
single variety of potato. All human activities
depend on the persistence of natural
“services” that emerge from complex webs of
re lat ional phenomena—basical ly , for
example: what happens to rainwater after it
hits the ground, how much is absorbed into
the soil? or runs to the sea? what force does
this give to river currents across a given
region?
We cannot say that poverty is caused by
ignorance or by negligence or by laziness. We
cannot say that wealth is caused by
knowledge or by perseverance or by merit.
There is no clear answer to such questions,
because the relational data is so multifaceted,
so layered, so many-threaded and inter-
twined, it is effectively impossible to make
singular declarative statements of universal
truth that ably define all related circum-
stances. So we must travel to the frontiers of
our awareness, and seek out the best and
newest information, the closest thing we can
get to the actual experience of another point
of view, and we must shape composite ideas,
that play well in our own and in others’
narratives, so that we can speak differently
and imaginatively, without sacrificing pre-
cision or stumbling into untruth.
Without this ability to work through the
complexities of plural-interest relationships,
we cannot ably locate or respect the freedom
of the other, which means in a world now
globally interconnected, we cannot guarantee
our own. Science is demonstrating that, while
elegant theories can be crafted to make
universal statements of fact—E=mc2, for
instance, or the idea that all matter is really
just astonishingly minuscule vibrating strings
—complexity is better able to explain what
really is the truth of the physical universe
than is simplicity.
Our choice is to understand that we must
never stop inquiring, we must never claim
there is nothing more to learn, and embrace
complexity and the work of living within it, or
ignore it, build up superstitious complaints
against its effects, and hope for the best.
Technology has reached a level of complexity
such that most people could not fashion from
scratch most of the basic tools they use to get
through their everyday existence: this is a
demonstration of complexity, both the virtue
of its vast efficacy and the difficulty of its
dominion over us. The right approach to
complexity is the thing we must pursue, not
the means by which to erase it from our
consciousness.
The right approach is the one which
allows us to deal, sustainably, with the actual
fabric of aspiration and incident. What the
scientist, the mystic, the politician or the
poet, learns, if she is honest about what she
is doing, is that there is no room for the false
claim that reality abhors complicated or
complicating considerations: reality is made
of complicated and complicating con-
siderations. What the honest thinker, explor-
er, seeker of true and relevant ideas about the
shape of the universe must acknowledge is
that to consider complexity is to begin to ask
the right questions. From there, we can
explore what otherwise appears to be, or to
ask for, the very simple.
53
Appendix
The Untiring Web of Influences
Consciousness seeks to know the shape of
the universe; reasoning is inherently
cosmological. Whether we approach the
problem of all that we don’t know by way of
Descartes’ admonition to first doubt of all
things, insofar as is reasonable, or by way of
Hume’s contiguity principle—that we can
know what is beyond our experience by
intuiting its relationship to something specific
within our experience, we labor, sometimes
heroically, to form viable pictures of the
universe as it must be.
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field image (detail). For
more information, go to bit.ly/hubbledeep
The Hubble Space Telescope’s Ultra Deep
Field survey—until this month the deepest
observation into the far reaches of the
universe (learn about the HXDF image at
bit.ly/hubblexdf)—captured the light of
10,000 galaxies. The HUDF project was able
to go deep enough to identify 10,000 galaxies
by focusing on just a tiny sliver of the night
sky. There is 12.7 million times more sky to
explore. This means the Hubble Ultra Deep
Field survey revealed to us that there are over
100 billion galaxies in the observable
universe. It would take over 1 million years,
however, to observe them all, using the
technology that got us this one astonishing
image.
The HUDF marked a paradigm shift in our
understanding of the observable universe. It
confirmed theories that had not yet been
proven by observational data, and it revealed
to us the unimaginable vastness, the crisis of
experiential saturation that we face, when we
seek to do that very thing which is most
inherent to our conscious activity—seeking to
know the shape of the universe, the nature of
things, the truth behind what appears to be.
The HUDF revealed not only galaxies and
galaxy clusters, but vast star -forming
regions, some bigger than galaxy clusters and
thought to be concentrations of matter and
energy that might differ greatly from the
physics we know and experience here on
Earth. It is difficult to know what piece of
information from the HUDF, HXDF and
future intergalactic observations, will provide
the catalyst for world-changing scientific
breakthroughs. The web of influences going
to work, all the time, on the universe we
inhabit is untiring and unswayed by factional
54
interest. We cannot urge it or believe it into
being what we require. Natural systems seek
stability, without giving evidence of a
conscious plan to acquire it. Human systems
give that evidence, but still contain flaws that
allow for unraveling.
The stability of all that we plan and do
and love depends remorselessly on the
resiliency of natural life-support systems. We
are now challenging those life-support
systems to survive our unknowing campaign
of hyper-exploitation and flawed vision. We
want what they offer, but we are not aware of
its true value. Just this week, the Climate
Vulnerable Forum, made up of 20 national
governments, released a study it com-
missioned from the humanitarian organi-
zation DARA. The DARA study found that by
2030, climate destabilization could kill 100
million people around the globe. While
skeptics say climate predictions are “alar-
mist”, the DARA study deals simply with
existing facts in evidence, and then looks at
what they indicate about a future in which no
action is taken.
The findings reveal something we need to
know in order to understand the paradigm
shift that is coming: we are already living
with the impact; our climate is destabilized in
dangerous ways, and we are paying a price.
According to the study, global economic
output—collective GDP—has already declined
by 1.6%, or $1.2 trillion. That is real wealth
that real people do not have the chance to
have contact with, because a destabilized
climate is undermining ecosystem services,
agricultural integrity, access to resources and
the reliably temperate climate patterns that
make much of the world favorable to human
habitation.
There is untiring complexity in the bio-
chemical infrastructure of sustainable life,
and there is unrelenting complexity in our
relationship to the natural world, which
includes the worst of our vices and inefficien-
cies. The coming paradigm shift relating to
climate is not that global climate patterns can
be destabilized; that one has come and gone,
for most astute observers—those who define a
paradigm. It is not that we must “do more
with less”; efficiency of consumption, resilien-
cy and resource retention are also well
understood. The paradigm shift that is
coming is the double awareness that we have
no choice—we must make sweeping changes
to the industrial infrastructure of the built
environment—and that we are already fully
equipped to make the transition affordably.
This double awareness can be called a
paradigm shift, because—most importantly—
we don’t know exactly what lies on the other
side: as we come to understand the immense
complexity of everything we touch, we will be
better able to envision the solutions to the
immensely complex problems that arise from
our fumbling through complexity. When that
moment comes, we will see new uses for old
technologies, new technologies that emerge
from simple variations in perspective and
practical application, and we will recognize
that complexity was, all along, the best
source of the solutions to the problems
complexity demands that we confront.
The difference will be our understanding,
and we will get there together or not at all.
55
Buckminster Fuller described the human brain as
“nature’s most powerful anti-entropy engine”. The
significance of that observation lies in the fact that we
often perceive ineluctable entropy as the only true fate of
any system that, for however short a time, pretends
order. In fact, Fuller argued, the human brain is
specifically designed to interfere with the process of
unraveling inherent in all systems, and to build order
sustainably into the fabric of anything it comes in
contact with. We recognize that this is the driving force
behind science, politics, anthropology and economics,
and we hope to use these pages as an opportunity to
show how insight, the quest for knowledge, real human
learning and ingenuity, can help us to transcend the
unforgiving limitations of the physical universe and
achieve something better, something more valuable, and
more conducive to mutual thriving, than what would
occur had we never sought or discovered that insight.
Wika Iritama: "Power to the people!"by Cynthia Paniagua
Dancing Resistance & Tradition for Los Boraa & Kukama-Kukamiria
in the Peruvian Amazon
This is a deeply personal account of my
previous and recent spiritual, cultural and
political life experiences and engagements
with the Boraa and Kukama-Kukamiria com-
munities and their struggle for human rights
and territorial sovereignty in the Peruvian
Amazon. I highlight traditional and newly
emerging dances as cultural and political
discourses for both of these native com-
munities. The dance is a vehicle which
explores conflicting and contradictory aspects
of its usage by and for the state of Peru, while
simultaneously being performed by the com-
munities as a voice of political resistance
(against the state). My commitment to the
struggle and to those I consider family further
encourages the use of narrative writing—a
proposed weaving of personal perspective and
theoretical opinion. The notion of ethno-
graphy-through-writing as a tool for political
change becomes an increasingly inspiring
endeavor—one previously clouded by very
early archival works claiming unrealistic
access to “objectivity”. I believe dance
ethnography, as an effective tool for political
change, is contingent on discarding this
overly used ideologically loaded term. (To
claim such a thing is to become overtly
subjective, absorbed in the self-imaging
project of being an omniscient being who
understands the “other”, yet knows better).
For this reason, I offer first hand oral
testimony, through interviews conducted in
the field, along with my personal assessment
of practice and theory. Inspired by the
methodological approach of Brenda Dixon
Gottschild, I am committed to “working
through”, and not around, the complexities
surrounding the body politic of traditional
dance—including issues of race and class.
The following account is a beginning, an
attempt to translate my fieldwork (otherwise
known to me as my life) as a performance
artist and activist to and through writing. I
hold on dearly to transparency as my
flotation device. This is step one.
The Language of “NO!”(Boraa, 2002 video)
The specific event which motivates my
research was my encounter with a video
shown to me in 2005 in the Upper Amazonian
city of Iquitos, Peru. As I desperately
searched for video of Boraa traditional dance
(in vain) at a regional cultural center, Lalo
Reategui, a member of the center began
speaking of another video that I may want to
see. A video filmed in 2002 was presented to
me.
The video revealed a negotiation forum
held between foreign corporate investors
representing pharmaceutical companies and
members of several native communities
accompanied by their Apus (leaders). It was a
forum held at Caballococha, a small rural
town at least 20 hours (by river and land)
57
from the city of Iquitos, bordering Peru,
Colombia and Ecuador. Within the simple
open-ended space the aesthetic distinctions
between the groups in the video were clear;
local indigenous communities were partly in
traditional dress, faces marked with colorful
traditional designs. The investors were
European, semi-casually dressed unmarked
by paint, but marked by their physical
distance and seemingly uneasiness. Present
were also translators from the capital of
Lima, positioned between the two groups of
negotiators. FECONA (Federation of native
communities along the Ampiyacu River) and
FECONAFROPU (Federation of native
communities along the Putumayo River) were
about to engage in open dialogue over
whether to allow the exploration of their
territories in exchange for infrastructural
development and economic “progress”: the
promise of educational centers in exchange
for unmonitored rainforest explorations, and
possible exploitation. This impending
invasion experience weighed upon the
interests of various native communities.
Members of the Boraa community had yet
to arrive at the meeting—their presence
necessary in order to commence the possible
signing of contracts. I began to question the
relevance of this video to my research, when
suddenly an Apu (leader, Miguel Mibeco Ruiz)
representing Los Boraa appears on the
screen. Miguel simply entered the space
quietly as everyone began to “take their
places”. Before either party spoke a word, the
sounds of song and drum broke the silence
and the tense formality of the space. What
seemed to be around 20 or 30 Boraa
community members entered the space with
song and dance, positioning themselves to
face the investors. It wasn’t too clear what the
initial reactions were, as the lens focused on
the dancing Boraa, but what was clear was
the sudden change in tone. Once the Boraa
completely filled the space they began
chanting aggressively in Boraa (language)
accompanied by several ‘gestural’ movements.
Some Boraa entered wearing ties around
their necks, with faces painted white, inside
of their hands drenched in red paint, as they,
one by one carried other traditionally dressed
Boraa to their reenacted ‘deaths’. One by one
they were placed on the floor, eyes shut
closed, some shivering. It was clear this
wasn’t a demonstration intended for enter-
tainment, nor a tourist attraction. They came,
they danced and they left, with an obvious
intention and message: that of resistance.
Los Boraa men and women clearly revamped
the negotiation table based on their own
terms of communication, void of third party
translators, verbal manipulations or suc-
cumbing to invasive foreign contracts. The
answer was clear. “NO”. As I watched the
monitor in disbelief, I began to observe the
confusion that ensued. The meeting could no
longer continue, the investors frozen and
speechless, and so the camera ceased to film
briefly after.
This exemplifies the ways in which
intangible forms of heritage, such as dance,
become a language of resistance, identity
negotiation, cultural autonomy and protest in
the name of territorial sovereignty, among
some native communities in the Peruvian
Amazon. I also feel it is important to focus
attention on the uses of traditional (folkloric)
and non-traditional dance by two native
58
communities, Boraa and Kukama-Kukamilla
as a tool for representation within the
contexts of folkloric dance institutions and
tourism, as well as in unconventional spaces.
The Kukama-Kukamilla communities were
not present in the 2002 video, but are
increasingly using cultural expressions such
as dance and poetry through movement as a
form of intervention, and are therefore very
relevant to this account. Both communities
share a history of displacement and ex-
ploitation resulting from colonial and
neoliberal state ideology, yet both com-
munities have very distinct languages and
traditional practices. With a history of
violence and mistreatment by the state and
foreign investors, many native communities
have joined forces to respond, supporting
various pan-indigenous movements. Dance is
a shared language within recent protest
activities. Thus far, I have only seen two of
these demonstrations—the 2002 video
(Boraa) and recently in 2009 (Kukama-
Kukamiria) upon an invitation to participate
and support their political cause.
I am interested in exploring how traditional
dance (as an intangible heritage) and (or/vs.)
new dance projects within these two com-
munities interweave as identity construction
mechanisms negotiated between unequal
powers compromised of local, state and
international actors. Within this context, I
also aim towards deconstructing racialized
clichés and stereotypes imposed upon
indigenous mobilized bodies by re-examining
the power relations present in racist per-
petuations and repercussions. This includes
addressing how indigenous body images are
manipulated by state politics to applaud the
‘exotic’, while simultaneously imposing and
condoning ethnic genocidal practices against
them, marking a disjuncture, a binary of
what is loved and what is hated. “The per-
petrators both fearful of and fascinated by
the (black) body were locked in the love-hate
syndrome that characterizes oppres-
sion.” (Gottschild p.15) Unlike Gottschild’s
mention of racism in the U.S. as a low grade
fever, I would say that oppressive race-class
relations regarding indigenous bodies in Latin
America are an ongoing high grade fever,
openly sanctioned by a 500-year-long colonial
legacy which is currently at its tipping point.
In this respect, I explore the rhetorical
question of “what is dance?” through it’s
discursive powers and its direct relationship
with folk dance institutions, heritage making,
state control, cosmovisions, human rights
and resistance in Peru.
Before watching the video of the 2002
Boraa demonstration, in 2005, I had lived
with the Boraa community for months at a
time, starting in 2004 (during which the
event was never mentioned.) However, before
my arrival to Iquitos, I had only the slightest
notion of who they were as a community. As
a performing Peruvian traditional dancer in
both New York City and Lima, Peru, the first
proclaimed notion of Boraa identity came
with a dance: what is commonly called la
danza de la selva (the jungle dance).
59
Los Boraa as represented by Peruvian folkdance institutions:
PERFORMANCE IN LIMA
La danza de la selva is performed within
folkloric institutions in order to represent
“authentic” Amazonian indigenous culture of
Peru. It is commonly performed by urban
mestizo1 folk dancers in touristy settings and
dance contests, particularly in the capital,
Lima. The five-minute circulated choreo-
graphy and dance style provide folkdance
institutions a way to include Amazonian
culture in their repertoires. Before it is
performed, it is commonly announced as
generally as the title implies—“the jungle
dance”—seldom adding any specificity to
what community it attempts to represent. As
the Amazon comprises more than 60% of
Peru’s geographical makeup, including over
30 different native communities and 46
different languages, this one popular staple
dance seems hardly sustainable, in the way
of its claims. La danza de la selva’s per-
formative fallacy of representing the whole
through parts, or Amazonian native com-
munities as one unit is exemplified by what
ethnographer Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
refers to as the “ethnographic fragment”.
Whether the representation essentializes (you are seeing the quintessence of the Balinese) or totalizes (you are seeing the whole through the part), the ethnographic fragment returns with all the problems of capturing, inferring, constituting, and presenting the whole through parts. (BKG p. 55)
The “part” that claims to represent the whole
is further delineated with a key objectified
body part. The skin. Commonly, dancers will
darken their skin before performing the selva
dance, where skin color (an aesthetic tied to
race distinctions) becomes the essential
“costume.”
Personally, these images provoked mem-
ories of minstrelsy practices in racist U.S.
entertainment history. My lens translated the
painted skin, along with the exoticized dance
as a symbol of power relations and ap-
propriation over the marginalized absent
body it tries to represent.
How did the folk dancers see themselves as
representing “la selva” with the use of skin
color as a self-conscious add on? During
group interviews I questioned the need to
darken the skin. I received the following short
responses from five different folkdance
troupes:
• "I’m too white, it would look just horrible ... Imagine my pale legs jumping to this; how embarrassing!"
• "To represent the true Amazonian. They get a lot of sun ... no they are born that way, it doesn’t wash off for them!" (jokingly laughing)
• "Because their skin is dark. We have to be authentic in representing the image the way it is, otherwise it will look fake."
• "Look at me! I’m already brown, I don’t need that makeup!" (smiling) (This answer was given by the solo dancer and group leader who opened choreography of the piece.)
• (response to the latter) "No, but now you need s l a n t e d e y e s ! Y o u ' r e n o t “ c h i n o ” enough!" (laughing)
• "To be more “charapa” (a staple name given to Amazonian natives) It's indigenous."
• "They have beautiful skin ... I wish I had that."
• "Its part of the image ... haven’t you seen them?"
60
When asked what native community the
dance represents, some the responses were
as follows, beginning with the troupe leader:
• “From Loreto. The Boraa, the ones from Iquitos … that whole region. The tribes that live in the Upper Amazon region of Loreto, you know. It’s a ritual dance to the earth.”
• “The ones who live in Loreto, but the real ones, not the ones who walk around wearing jeans dancing cumbia. They are losing their culture. We make sure the tradition doesn’t die.”
• “Los Boraa.. I know because of they way they move…. like … more to the earth… because they know the earth better, they know the jungle better, so they move like that. They “have” that, they are used to it.”
• “I think its the Boraa but also the Yagua because they live right next to each other.”
This was not the first time I heard similar
stereotypical notions on the indigenous body.
These were more or less the same answers
given to me back in New York City, where la
danza de la selva is routinely performed in
the same manner; a staple dance to round
out their multi-cultural depiction of Peruvian
culture. Programs usually consist of an array
of Andean and coastal dances, accompanied
with announced histories, meaning, etc.
Suddenly the lights dim for the spectacle, of
the ambiguous yet “exciting and mysterious”
Amazonian indigenous identity. Signature
movements are the same, ranging from very
low crouching, sudden high “attack-like”
jumps, spear throwing, high screeching,
animal calls, promoting embodied notions of
the “animal”, “primal”, “wild” and “uncouth”.
These are all common stereotypes of the
indigenous body attached to a colonized
Darwinistic view of indigenous “folk” as
primal, the embodiment of “the natural”,
whose movements are therefore binary to a
Eurocentric aesthetic of uprightness, of
‘civility’. The folk dancers interviewed glorify
the indigenous body as a deeply intuitive
body, naturally agile, the quintessence of
“animal” so to speak. “But racism and social
Darwinism have attached sticky, negative
connotations to this reverse anthropomor-
phism” (Gottschild p45), an idea that further
perpetrates the stereotype that agility in
indigenous bodies is an innate quality, not
learned. I could not help but feel my body
reject the dance as an all-flash, plastic,
racist, exoticized misappropriation of identity.
As it repeated (with exact choreography) with
every show, I wondered where my place was
in all of this.
Through the kind of repetition required by staged appearances, long runs, and extensive tours, performances can become like artifacts. They freeze. They become canonical. They take forms that are alien, if not antithetical, to how they are produced and experienced in their local settings, for with repeated exposure, cultural performances can become routinized and trivialized. (BKG p. 64 )
State Obsession (Love?)
Folkdance is a Peruvian state necessity. It is
an essential cultural marker that becomes
the spokesperson for a homogeneous yet
pluricultural patrimony. It is necessary to
claim heritage, to mark ‘difference’ as agency
within a capitalist international community.
With similar uses of heritage for the national
museum, the Peruvian state supports the
promotion of “cultural wholeness” through
dance representations, as “efforts to produce
61
unity out of diverse rural traditions.” (Klein p.
3) The dance becomes part of a symbol, a
“nation brand“ where dance is objectified and
easily marketed over a peculiar fine print: Too
much difference not included. In this respect,
la danza de a selva
can safely be used to fulfill the limited time slots in the showcase of a “multi-cultural” or “diversity agenda”, and very often remains embedded in hierarchal premises that confirm the status quo. (Chatterjea p. 7)
The aesthetic of what is already labeled as
the indigenous body is run through an
acculturation machine where it is dis-
mantled, pruned, reassembled and regulated
as marketable to the gaze of the dominant
culture. The indigenous body becomes erased
in all its transformed “new” staged visibility
where people are defined to skin color,
animalist ic movements, a celebrated
anomaly.
The phases of appropriation give a false
sense of ‘getting closer’ when the dance
actually performs another kind of work:
In short, the appropriation not only produces the divide between dominance and subalternity but also the demand for further appropriation as a very condition of social reproduction. That race, class, gender, and sexuality, as the very materiality of social identity, are also produced in the process indicates the pract ical generativity ... necessary for any cultural product.” (Martin p. 206)
As folklore is repeatedly taught as rep-
resentative of “everyday life”, to all Peruvians
as national identity markers, la danza de la
selva falls into the dangers of cultural and
political ambiguity.
Similarly by aestheticizing folklore—no matter what is gained by the all inclusive definition of folklore as the arts of everyday life—we are in danger of depoliticizing what we present by valorizing an aesthetics of marginalization. (BKG p. 76)
For these reasons I left the folk dance in-
stitution and traveled to Iquitos to under-
stand how the Boraa represent themselves
and get a first-hand opinion of this pop jungle
dance promoted to represent them. I affiliated
myself with FORMABIAP,3 an NGO dedicated
to preserving the language and traditions
within the northern Amazonian native com-
munities. After all this misrepresentation I
had observed and felt with the business of
culture making, I became self conscious with
regard to what my dancing body meant.
Dancing beyond my body
When it came to performing traditional dan-
ces from the Andes, I felt deep connections
due to traditions practiced within my family
since childhood, in and out of Peru. None-
theless I avoided dancing la danza de la selva
due to lack of background information, dis-
connectedness and a distrust in the in-
stitutional “bastardizing” of it. I was raised to
dance “con el espiritu y corazón de los
ancestros, con el sexto sentido” (with the spirit
and heart of the ancestors and with the sixth
sense)—a principle I hold dear. I needed to
further understand certain meanings before I
could connect and perform, otherwise my
body would feel empty; moving as a bag of
skin with no sense of agency given to me by
the spirit. Dance existed (and still exists) for
me beyond physical movement, where the
62
physical execution was secondary to the
elation of a lived liminal space, a strong
circulating communication held between the
body and the spirit. In retrospect, this
phenomenological experience of dance and
the body as enacted by the spirit, is a shared
one. I recall my grandmother who em-
phasized dancing our ancestral past of mem-
ory through spirit, where “they” sometimes
dance through and with you”, a merging of
the collective and the individual through an
extraphenomenal force: Soul power is both
personal and collective.” (Gottschild p. 231)
The question of “what is dance”?” for me
swims through this ever changing, inter-
weaving consciousness and subconscious-
ness between the body and the spirit or soul,
whether it is mine or not. This cosmology
passed down to me by my grandmother
furthered the idea that in order to be an ef-
fective “mover” I had to be a transmitter of
the spirit, the energies. La danza de la selva
in no way evoked any spirit in me, where
perhaps a dance from anywhere in the world
could.
The process of meaning making, (a lim-
inality in itself,) where dance becomes the
narrative between my body and the memory
of my ancestors or (spirits) suggests a pheno-
menological approach as a “way of living in
the world that integrates intellect with sen-
sory experience... it can be used to construct
meaning, to celebrate the mundane as well as
the extraordinary...” (Closer p. 2) This ethical
relationship with the senses and dance
serving as both an “inner and outer“
experience, highlight the fact that:
The senses represent inner states not shown on the surface. They are located in a social material field outside of the body... This speaks of a social aesthetics that is not purely contracted or negotiated synchrony but one that is embedded within and inherited from, an autonomous network of object relations and prior sensory exchanges. Performance therefore is elicited by externality and history as much as it may come from within. (Seremetakis p. 67)
Considering this, who or what legitimizes
traditional dance as ‘authentic’?
“Authenticity” as a problematic term within
the social sciences is nevertheless a term
relied upon among several folkloric theorists
to legitimize their claims. Amazonian archival
histories have already created a ‘false nos-
talgia” or romanticized ancestral past, seen
through a “privileged” gaze, rendering the in-
digenous body to the symbol of “purity”.
Another way to approach the question of au-
thenticity ‘is described by Peruvian anthro-
pologist Gisepa Canepa Koch:
Authenticity should be understood as the capacity for social groups to represent themselves, and to own those spaces within national and global discourses, which permits them to assert who they are for the ability of auto representation and self determination, instead of the resistance of supposed essential identities. (Canepa Koch p.16)
Los Boraa as representing themselves through dance
Upon my arrival to the main plaza in central
Iquitos, there it was, la danza de la selva,
performed by scantily clad young girls pan-
handling for tourists. I quickly made my way
to FORAMBIAP, was provided with a guide,
63
and traveled by boat down the Nanay river to
the Boraa settlements. The close proximity of
Boraa migrant settlement to central Iquitos is
the result of a growing economic dependency
to the global market, where tourist activity is
the main source of income. The display of
representational dances supersedes any other
activity, including the selling of arts and
crafts, as the leading money-maker. In fact,
the tourist boom (which started in the mid to
late nineties) increased the demand for
tourist outlets, creating new reasons for
Boraa to migrate and settle. It was, therefore,
no surprise that I was greeted with a dance
specifically performed for tourists.
Dressed in traditional clothing, five dan-
ces were presented to me, none of them
resembling la danza de la selva in the least.
The dances were t it led la danza de
bienvenido, la del mono, la del lagarto, la del
anaconda y de celebración (The welcome
dance, of the monkey, of the lizard, of the
anaconda and of celebration.)
What meanings did these dances have for
them? How is globalization (fast-paced
tourism and related development) creating
new traditions? What about la danza de la
selva that represents them in the capital?
The following interview (2005) with Boraa
Apu (leader) Miguel Mibeco Ruiz, also known
as Lliihyo described the dances as such:
MR: These dances (the five shown) are
centuries old, from our grandfathers, our
ancestors .. all the way from the Putumayo
River.
CP: Even the “welcome dance?”
MR: NO, no, not that one…. we created that
one for tourists a couple of years ago. All of
these are to welcome foreigners to our
dance practices, or cultural activities … so
they can see and participate.
CP: Are any of these dances danced outside
of here? (the tourist settlement)
MR: NO. In San Andres (where we live)... we
have our own celebrations, but we don’t
dance these. We dance socially, but not
these. These dances are our heritage, but
we don’t dance them anymore in San
Andres. Maybe on the occasion, to show
our children, but the practice of it is
mostly done here. That is our income also.
Noone else has this same tradition this
style of dance. This is purely Boraa.
CP: The tourist camp is part of your tradition
as well...
MR: Yes. Its good, we make enough money to
sustain ourselves and we keep our
tradition alive. Sometimes we make new
dances. Its how we survive.
CP: What if dancing didn’t pay ... the purpose
of dancing then...
MR: Maybe not so often, I don’t know. I still
would want my grandchildren’s children to
learn it... even though it changes...
sometimes, to make it better.
CP: What changes? How is that?
MR: For tourists I see some dances change...
not the steps, but the way the steps are
done. More force, more energy, step on the
ground harder. Louder singing. Before it
was softer...
CP: Which one do you like better?
64
MR: Both. The softer version makes me feel
more inside. Its from my childhood. The
new versions are exciting and it gets more
attention from tourists. My grandchildren
like it better like that, they have more fun.
I showed Miguel a video of la danza de la
selva. His reaction:
MR: No, that’s not it... What is that?! That’s
what they dance over here in the plaza...
that’s not us. (laughing) They make money
doing this? MMMM ... Why do they say it’s
Boraa? This is not Boraa. Its nobody. It’s
the young students from the city (Iquitos).
What’s it called again?
CP: “la danza de la selva”. Most troupes are
informed that it is a dance that represents
Boraa ... Yagua.. –
MR: No. No, no, no. Not Boraa, not even
Yagua ... no native community here dances
that. The lights look nice and so do the
costumes... but that’s not us, that’s what
they want to say. That’s an invented
dance ... not ours. Thats not it ... not it.
But what are you going to do ? What can I
do? Tell them to come here and see how it
is... How crazy ... crazy. Look at that. (as
he watched the screen off my camera) They
think we are made of feathers?
CP: Its not authentic?
MR: (clearly upset) What is authentic? It
means the truth. That is not the truth.
That is not Boraa. They can never take,
imitate, my cosmovision ... It doesn’t
matter what they do. Its not Boraa.
(Miguel Ruiz Tamani, personal communi-
cation, August 2005)
The excerpt from this interview challenges the
notion of “truth” in dance. Truth for whom?
The heritage making, the self-conscious
display of “what used to be” practiced as
ritual celebrations now becomes a vital
tradition of signifying itself.
Tradition (whether old or new) becomes heritage, on the other hand, when its authenticity and it’s imminent death are recognized (or invented) with the express purpose of “expediency”, that is, of getting things done in the world, whether that be preserving an ancient temple, reviving a folk festival in order to attract tourism, or, as in the case of the Morrocan Gnawa ... validating the artistic traditions of minority groups in order to increase their visibility and viability on the global stage. (Kapchan p. 3, Possessed by Heritage)
The five Boraa dances, have nothing to do
with la danza de la selva , yet, by default may
be perceived as serving the promotional
tourism and state sponsored commodification
of heritage, “contributing to the health of
national culture” by contributing to the
tourist industry. Who, then, owns folkloric
dance? Los Boraa? Local travel agencies?
Respected folkdance institutions? The state?
Is dance an object to be owned? A
Foucaultian view would waste no time in
concluding that both individual and com-
munal decisions on cultural meaning-making
as an activity are inevitably tied to state
cultural control. Especially when regarding
the systematic internalized “eye of the Other”
discoursed by new aesthetics practiced in
Boraa dances. “Since the Other was reluctant
to recognize, there was only one answer: to
make myself known.” (Fanon p. 92)
65
As for la danza de la selva, it confirmed
that Los Boraa receive NO respect in the
decision making process of folkdance
institutions which claim to represent them.
Los Boraa practices do, however, reinforce
their cultural rights by reinforcing their
unique dance performances (whether for
tourists or not) as a self-determined identity
marker. Regardless of any changes, inevitable
with time, Boraa self-representation through
dance is a choice, a spiritual continuum of
past memory as the new dances are:
promised as substitutions, replacements and improvements to prior sensate experiences. (Seremetakis p. 8)
Admittedly, I couldn’t help but feel like the
dance was cheapened, a feeling totally
arbitrary on my part. In retrospect, remem-
bering Miguel’s preference for the “softer
movements” which provoked more “feeling
inside” and also his indispensable, im-
penetrable and theft proof private relationship
to the Boraa cosmovision negates state con-
trol.
Particular and now idiosyncratic cultural experiences are described as having long disappeared, as lost, when in fact they are quite recent and their memory sharp. As one moves deeper into conversation with people, their intimacies with these distant practices comes out as fairy tales, anecdotes, folklore and myth (Seremetakis p. 9)
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett notes how, “in
making a spectacle of oneself, or others, what
is private or hidden becomes publicly ex-
hibited; what is small or confined becomes
exaggerated, grand or grandiose” (BKG, p. 48)
I was invited to live with los Boraa after
about a week of visiting. I lived in the com-
munity for about four months, leaving my
camera in Iquitos. I have not been the same
since. For the purposes of this report, I will
not indulge in elaborating on my personal
experiences during that time, but will note
the following: Miguel was right. None of the
tourist dances are physically enacted in San
Andres; I have, however, witnessed elder men
and women speak of the dance to their
grandchildren through narratives based on
spiritual beliefs and Boraa cosmovision.
State Hate
The Boraa and Kukama-Kukamilla communi-
ties have survived centuries of displacement
by Spanish colonizers and later foreign and
Lima-based economic markets, forcing them
through several cycles of colonization and
assimilation. These neoliberal systems have
continually mandated the exploitation, en-
slavement and even genocidal treatment,
which comprise the history of these families,
among so many other indigenous com-
munities. Not only have they fallen victim to a
violent history with foreign rubber investors
and their mafias, but they have also endured
decades of territorial battles resulting from
the rise of the cocaine industry, civil war,
terrorism and the current exploitation of
recently discovered hydro-carbons in their
lands. Recognition as a community with
territorial sovereignty and human rights by
the Peruvian state is crucial to their current
economic, cultural and basic human survival.
66
In the last three decades we have observed an important dynamic of the development of political systems within Amazonian indigenous society, a response to the pressure exercised by an expansive national society whose objectives are not only to transform the environment of these groups, but also modify their cultural, economic and social status. (p.21 PNUD, Proyectos RLA/92/G 31,32,33)
Not much has changed since 500 years
ago. In 2006, Peruvian president Alan García,
after signing the Free Trade Agreement with
the U.S., arbitrarily opened Amazonian ter-
ritories and (so indigenous bodies) to foreign
petroleum consortia for exploitation, without
the prior consent of indigenous communities.
The violation of state and international law,
indigenous human rights, human and eco-
logical contaminations, that followed led to
pan-indigenous protests in 2009. On June
5th, 2009, peaceful protests turned to violence
as police and military helicopters fired upon
hundreds of unarmed members of protesting
native communities—Boraa and Kukama-
Kukamiria included (the massacre at Bagua).
President García later publicly denounced
indigenous peoples as “savages” who:
are not first-class citizens and who ever has this way of thinking wants to take us into irrationality, a primitive regression. To the past. (Alan García, Canal N, June 2009)
As a result of these happenings, I was
invited back to Iquitos, in November 2009, to
give testimony of the violations of human
rights (tied to oil exploration) I had witnessed
with the Boraa in 2005. Los Boraa, along
with Achuar and Kukama-Kukamilla native
communities, were also planning a protest
event in memory of those lost in Bagua. I was
specifically invited to take part as a perfor-
mance artist. Five Kukama women organized
a dance and poetry performance as part of
the protest.
Dance insurgency: Kukama-Kukamilla
Kukama-Kukamilla are a community that
has integrated almost completely into urban
life in Iquitos since the nineteen seventies.
With the exception of small settlements along
the Marañón River, most Kukama-Kukamilla
live in the city of Iquitos. Maritza Rodríguez,
considered a Kukama Apu (leader), a bilin-
gual teacher (member of FORMABIAP) and
organizer of the Kukama dance demonstra-
tion addresses her cultural and political
concerns in an interview conducted the day
before the protest event:
M R : We a r e w h a t I c a l l a n “ e t n i a
urbana” (urban ethnic group). Because we
wear jeans, speak Spanish and are
completely assimilated into urban life does
not mean we are any less “indigenous”. We
have the same history of genocide as the
Boraa. Maybe some of the dance traditions
that were practiced long ago ... are gone.
But either way I strongly identify with my
heritage and work toward the recuperation
of our community. The Kukama are
warriors by nature. We resist. It is tradition
to resist. Violence marks our history, all of
our histories as indigenous people. Los
Boraa, Yagua, Achuar are dying from
contamination. What does the world do?
NOTHING. But we are willing to die to
protect what is rightfully ours. Alan García
67
is making a grave mistake. He is not only
killing us, he is killing the “lungs of the
earth” and everyone will feel it eventually.
The fact that I’m standing means that I am
here to speak out, to mobilize, to risk my
life for justice.
CP: What will the dance mean for tomorrow’s
protest?
MR: That we are not afraid. If they arrest me
because I am dancing, that will be the
“ultimate”! They say I am a terrorist
because I’m speaking the truth. But our
bodies are already condemned to death! We
are not the ones terrorizing... I want
everyone to hear the poetry, the words that
denounce Alan.
CP: Why dance?
MR: It’s not to entertain, or to do what people
expect of us, traditional dance with
traditional dress, feathers. No. Our
ancestors danced before battle and so do
we, except we do it in public, our own way.
The spirit is still there, you understand ...
It’s to warn them (authorities), it’s to show
our determination, that my body is still
alive and even after they kill me, I will be
there. We are not afraid ... and we won’t
stop until we are respected, recognized. We
have to show who we are, that we are not
terrorists. We are more “civilized” than these
killers of the supposed “first class”. Dance
demonstrates that we exist. That the in-
digenous body is there, moving, expressing,
reacting. And my voice will go with it. If we
couldn’t change the law through table
dialogue, then it is time to mobilize. Be
militant—otherwise we disappear, fall into
conformity like so many Peruvians do...
Disappear into the forest (the background).
CP: It will only be Kukama women performing
this tomorrow?
MR: Yes, we indigenous women have a lot to
say. We are there to see the blood shed, to
take care of our dying brothers, children.
We want to show that we can be involved in
protesting. We are a community, with one
voice—men, women, even the youth are
getting involved.
CP: Who made the dance moves?
MR: All of us. Some of them are movements
from traditional war dances but most of it is
just how we feel, how our body wants to
move—we are angry—with the words of the
poem. And the rest is improvised, you know
how it is… we barely have time to get the
girls together for rehearsal …we are always
detained by police, questioning. But you’ll
see it tomorrow … and you’ll dance in the
battle too! Don’t be scared!
CP: (laugh) I am “gringa” here though.
MR: What?! No you are indigenous... I feel
that... besides from your Andean family ...
anyone that comes to fight for us has an
indigenous heart. Your friends from your
school who care have indigenous hearts...
anyone. I will dance it tomorrow ... and
make it loud. Wika Iritama!
CP: What?
MR: “Poder al pueblo!” (Power to the ‘pueblo’ -
people, the popular masses)
(Maritza Ramirez, personal communication,
Dec. 2009)
68
Considering the dance as a human rights
discourse, through protest, as a means to
express the “tradition to resist”, Maritza
implies a tradition of violence as part of
Kukama and Boraa heritage. The very lives of
indigenous communities are in danger, yet
the dance persists as a direct language of
insurgency where the body becomes agency
for affect and reaffirmation of identity against
the state. Again we see the body literally
“becoming responsible” for the survival of a
community, to gain visibility, to represent
and say “we exist” on different platforms
where the bodies of the oppressed cannot be
negotiated on the terms of the Other. There is
a double-consciousness of what is expected of
them in terms of dance and tradition. Maritza
highlights the continuity of tradition “our own
way”, breaking free of an expected dance
routine while maintaining the cosmovision of
the dancing spirit. Contrary to the roman-
ticized notion of the indigenous communities
as passageways into the primal, the past, or
as obstacles against modernity:
replication of the body is not a “ condition in every ethnographic community, and even, then … human bodies are never stable over time. Yet they may be perceived to be stable in some instances and viewed as an authentic conduit to a past and continuing performance identity. (Buckland p. 15)
The dance exists in and out of the tourist
camp, the body asserting itself from private to
public spaces, but maintaining a communal
goal. Survival. The uncodified movements
demonstrated by the Kukama women “make
themselves known”, and make visible, all unequal actors (local, state, international) on
the stage of the community plaza. No fine
print, no exceptions, no third-party trans-
lators.
The intent of such choreographies is to reveal the forces of oppression to the viewer, to render them blatantly visible, thereby destabilizing them ... to subvert the status quo (Gere p.140)
Culture becomes a vital resource for native
communities in the Peruvian Amazon, not
only as it marks difference, but as an integral
part of the centuries’-long sustaining of place
(territory). In the case of urbanized etnias
such as the Kukama-Kukamilla and Boraa,
culture—no matter how subjugated or altered
it may be—is a vital part of a mobilizing axis
of the urge to self-determination and auto-
nomous development. This cultural principle
acknowledges the supremacy of the spiritual
realms mentioned, and of the ideas and lan-
guages (including dance) that conceive and
express them. According to both Boraa and
Kukama-Kukamilla, to kill the rainforest is to
kill them, their ancestors and their way of life
—an unquantifiable reality.
Can dance as protest for the Kukama or
Boraa communities become part of new local
tradition? If so, then its practice as a direct
negation to state interests would threaten all
preconceived notions of state-serving cultural
activity, negate the role of folkloric in-
stitutions who are quicker to glorify la danza
de la selva than these protest dances. Fur-
thermore, it would fall outside the categories
of a desired state “pluralistic culture” since
president García continues to reinforce the
idea that Amazonian indigenous are “second-
class citizens”. As disowned by an authori-
tarian Peruvian government, not only the
dance, but its cultural cultivators are unac-
69
ceptable, labeled by the state as an obstacle
to state “progress”.
Moving onwards, never stopping
On December 4, 2009, communities from
near and far gathered to protest against the
criminalization of indigenous peoples and of
the right to protest. Present were Boraa,
Kukama-Kukamilla, Achuar, Kichwa, Ticuna,
Aguaruna, Wampis communities. Maritza and
her comrades opened the scene with poetry, a
call and response which collectively began to
include the voices of other demonstrators.
When the streets became loud enough with
call and response, confirming that all were in
solidarity, the dance began.
The poetry accompanied the movement,
but not as a subtitle or a logical explanation
of it. Whether a dance scholar from NYU
comes to interpret the dance as “gestural or
narrative” or read into the use of words their
serving as movement interpreters, the dance
as logical or illogical—as the academic gaze of
a dance scholar may easily pick up on these
things—this gaze was foreign to me in the
moment, an in-depth dance analysis far re-
moved from the concerns of the Kukama and
Boraa communities. Nothing mattered but
the bodies, the spirits, the life, the death. As I
participated, the spirit pulled me, my body
touching other bodies, some sick with
impending death. Mourning the dead fueled
militancy. (Gere p. 142) We held onto each
other.
Moving together as a fearless mass, sing-
ing, dancing, mourning, shouting for the
right to be heard, was a moment I will never
forget. Although we were subsequently de-
tained, none of us could be threatened into
silence. Los Boraa and Kukama-Kukamilla
among others affected are teaching me, and
those who truly listen, about the value of and
commitment to human life.
As Miguel once said: “Jamás me podrían
quitar ... mi cosmovisión. Hagan lo que
hagan.” (“They can never take ... my cosmo-
vision [the spirit]. It doesn’t matter what they
do.”)
The Author
Cynthia Paniagua is a dancer, choreographer,
and educator whose work reflects her
Peruvian heritage. She was raised in New
York City where she earned a B.A. in dance at
Hunter College and an M.A. in Performance
Studies at NYU. She won a Fulbright
scholarship to study traditional dance in Peru
to “quench a burning desire to know the real
Peru, my mothers country and unearth the
mystery of the dances.” She studied at Peru’s
two leading folkdance institutions Jose Maria
Arguedas and San Marcos. She then
journeyed up and down the coast, Andes and
Amazon of Peru studying and living with
many of the living masters of Peruvian dance.
Her experience was taped as part of the movie
Soy Andina. In 2007 the movie was released
and Cynthia returned to Peru with the movie
and dance workshops as part of the biggest
cultural exchange tour ever organized by the
U.S. Embassy. She continued touring the
movie and Peruvian dance workshops in the
70
U.S.. Her success and positive response from
her audience has encouraged her to continue
to share the experience and the treasure of
Peruvian dance. Today Cynthia divides her
time between NY and Peru where she
performs, choreographs, and teaches. “The
journeys are part of my quest in order to
respect my ancestors through dance and
share that energy with my audience and
students.” She is the founder of Kaypacha
Dance, a project to bring together Peruvian
indigenous dance, culture and spirituality,
and contemporary dance expression.
Notes
1 – mestizo: Literally translates as “mixed” and used as a race label - a mixed race of of Spanish and Indigenous blood In common every day usage, however, “mestizo” is synonymous to “criollo”, a more Eurocentric perspective that attaches itself to an elite class and lighter skin.
2– Borra are part of the Huitoto linguistic family. Within this family are two other groups, Huitoto and Ocaina.
3- FORMABIAP – Programa de Formacion de Maestros Bilingues de la Amazonia Peruana. – Educational Program for Bilingual Teachers in the Peruvian Amazon.
Bibliography
Buckland, Theresa Jill. 2006. Dancing from Past to Present: Nation, Culture, Identities. University of Wisconsin Press.
Canepa Koch, Gisela. 1998. Mascara, Transformación e Identidad en los Andes. Pontifica Universidad Catolica Del Peru. Lima, Peru.
Chatterjea, Ananya. 2004. Butting Out. Reading Resistive Choreographies Through Works by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Chandralekha. Wesleyan University Press. Connecticut.
Fanon, Frantz. 1952. English translation copyright 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. Ediciones de Soleil.ed. Richard Philrod.
Gere, David. 2004. How to Make Dances in an Epidemic. Tracking Choreography in the Age of Aids. The University of Wisconsin Press. England.
Gottschild, Brenda Dixon.2003.The Black Dancing Body. A Geography From Coon to Cool. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kapchan, Deborah. In press. Introduction.Intangible Rights: Cultural Heritage and Human Rights. Deborah Kapchan editor. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara 1998. Destination Culture. Tourism, Museum and Heritage. University of California Press.
Klein, Barbro. 2006. Cultural Heritage, Human Rights, and Reform Ideologies: The Case of Swedish Folklife Research. Intangible Rights: Cultural Heritage and Human Rights.Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Kozel, Susan.2007.Closer: Performance Technologies, Phenomenology. MIT Press. Cambridge, Massachussets.
Martin, Randy.1998. Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics. Duke University Press.
Proyectos RLA/92/G 31,32,33. 1997. Amazonia Peruana: Comunidades Indigenas, Conocimientos y Tierras Tituladas. PNUD (Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo) / GEF (Fondo Mundial del Ambiente).
Seremetakis, C. Nadia, ed.1994. The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
71
Take it from Yale: What we really need to communicate about climate changeby Steve Valk
Of all the third rails a member of Congress
can touch to commit political suicide, the
deadliest is to propose a tax on carbon, right?
Well, that depends. If you couple that tax
with an equivalent reduction in income taxes
– a revenue-neutral tax swap, as it were –
majorities across the political spectrum
would vote for a candidate who supports it. In
fact, only 25 percent of Republicans would
oppose for that reason.
That’s just one of the surprising findings
from the Yale Project on Climate Change
Communication, which, since 2005, has been
trying to bridge the gap between climate
change science and policies that could avert
catastrophe.
If there is a gap between science and
policy, it most likely stems from the public’s
confusion about climate change and its
causes. At the Citizens Climate Lobby
Conference in Washington, D.C., last month,
Tony Leiserowitz from the Yale Project walked
us through the research. Some of it was
depressing, but a lot of it was hopeful,
pointing to opportunities that exist for
communicating vital information on climate
change.
The depressing: S ince 2007, the
percentage of people who say global warming
is happening has dropped significantly.
Tracking data from Pew, for instance, finds
that figure fell from 77 percent in 2007 to 58
percent in 2010. Since then, however, those
numbers have rebounded but have yet to
reach previous levels. Equally disconcerting
is the trend in what people believe is the
cause of global warming. The percentage who
think it is human-induced has declined while
the percentage who believe it occurs naturally
has gone up (see below).
So, why all the confusion? Hasn’t everyone
read James Hansen’s “Storms of My
Grandchildren”? Well, no they haven’t, and
Leiserowitz ticks off a list or reasons behind
these numbers heading in the wrong
direction:
• The economy and unemployment
• Declining media coverage
• Unusual cold weather
• An effective “denial industry”
• “Climategate”
• Increasing political polarization
One of the more illuminating facts from
the Yale Project is the percentage of people
72
who think there is agreement among the
experts on climate change and its causes.
Among scientists who do peer-reviewed
research on climate change, various surveys
show some 98 percent concur that global
warming is happening, primarily because we
burn fossil fuels. For those who follow the
issue closely, this comes as no surprise.
Among the general public, however, this vital
piece of information has gone unnoticed (see
below).
The opportunity: Based on extensive
research done by the Yale Project over the
years, here are the five most important things
that need to be communicated to the public
about climate change:
1) Climate change is happening
2) We're causing it this time
3) There are serious consequences to
humans and nature
4) Experts agree on the first 3 points
5) There are lots of options to solve this
problem and to make our lives better.
Among these, number four is perhaps the
most critical. Leiserowitz characterizes this as
a “gateway belief.” Those who understand
that scientists are in agreement on climate
change and its causes are likely to accept the
first three points. Those who accept the first
three points are likely to be concerned or
alarmed about the situation and expect their
government to do something about it. This is
where that elusive phenomenon called
political will kicks in, and we inch closer to
the tipping point for pricing carbon.
Which takes us back to that delightfully
surprising poll I mentioned at the beginning
about large majorities supporting a revenue-
neutral tax swap on carbon (see below).
Leiserowitz et al (2011)
As one might expect, strong majorities of
Democrats and Independents would support
a tax shift, but 51 percent of Republicans
also express support for a carbon tax swap,
with only 25 percent likely to oppose. What
makes this poll even more remarkable is that
support for this type of a carbon price exists
even in the face of limited understanding
among the public on climate change (that
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depressing stuff we talked about before). As
more and more people begin to comprehend
the ramifications of our changing climate,
support for a price on carbon will only go up.
There’s lots more juicy information from
the Yale Project, including the latest poll
finding that pro-climate-policy candidates are
likely to win votes and another study showing
more and more people connecting the dots
between extreme weather and climate
change.
So, here’s your conversation opener for
the next six months: “Bet you didn’t know 98
percent of climate scientists say global
warming is happening and we’re the cause.”
Tell them Tony from Yale sent you.
The Author
Steve Valk is Director of Communications for
Citizens Climate Lobby.
Cu!ing Arts & Music Programs Erodes Our Children’s Potentialby Joseph Robertson
A version of this article first appeared on The
Hot Spring Network on August 4, 2010.
When state and municipal budgets are tight,
education funding is usually targeted for
cuts. The politics of the cuts is almost always
framed as being about “holding teachers and
schools accountable” as a way of protecting
the future we expect for children. The reality
is that those cuts reduce the resources
available to students, and “non-essential”
courses like music and art—usually those
subjects for which accounting consultants
are not able to quantify future return on
investment—are eliminated in favor of those
subjects standardized test-makers know how
to test for—those subjects which the test-
score-based system for budgeting converts to
direct monetary value for the schools.
But who is being held accountable? What
is called “accountability” in political speeches
turns out to be broadly punitive from the
start, and it is the future diversity of stu-
dents’ skills that are in fact targeted. The
system is deliberately degraded, due to a
philosophy that says hardship will generate
improvement—a reckless distortion of the
science of natural selection, in which features
74
that promote survival are promoted by that
survival.
Funding cuts are also carried out in a way
that is inherently dishonest, justified to all as
a way of building accountability, but cut from
districts where there is less wealth per
household, meaning they require higher
levels of statewide funding, to achieve the
same diversity of skill and experience other
communities might find funded through
extracurricular programs and other types of
budgeting, whether private or public. More
money is revoked from where it is needed by
maligning the notion of shared responsibility:
convince a given community that its money
should not help a more needy community,
and you will have the freedom to erode that
needy community’s basic resources.
The philosophy that funding and perfor-
mance are not linked, or that markets can be
abstracted from the communities that feed
them, is spread through political rhetoric,
because it has to spread in order to justify
removing funding from schools in com-
munities which cannot provide adequate
funding to achieve competitive standards in
resources, personnel and infrastructure. The
myth that “responsible” communities do more
with less is used as a bludgeon to malign
poor communities and deprive their children
of funding.
We can easily confirm this is a myth by
simply looking at what wealthy communities
demand of their public schools: a diverse
range of subject matter, including robust art,
humanities, and phys-ed programs; expen-
sive, highly trained faculty, sometimes with
doctoral degrees; extracurricular extra-
vagance, from football stadiums to radio
stations and TV studios; school newspapers;
latest edition textbooks; free-of-charge on-
campus photo-copying services, etc.
Everything wealthy communities demand
of their schools is, to some extent reasonable,
but it is not so clear whether any community
has a right to say another community’s
children should be denied those services just
because their parents are not affluent. In
poor, inner-city school districts, it is common
to have only a small minority of faculty
meeting state requirements for Masters
degrees, common to have teachers trained in
one subject teaching something totally
unrelated, due to shortages of qualified
teachers for that subject, or budget
constraints, common to have older textbooks,
shared textbooks or none at all, common to
have no funding for extensive extracurricular
activities in which students are able to
choose a path that matches up well to their
personal preferences and character.
Television studios, radio stations and
school newspapers are much harder to come
by, because all necessary funding is devoted
to basic life-support: teachers, sanitation,
security. Vital programs in language, arts,
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and phys-ed are often cut, simply because
schools can no longer afford to pay teachers.
In New York City, in the fall of 2012,
“education reform” has seen the elimination
of “language arts” programs, meaning the
effective use of grammar for thoughtful
composition is not given as much time or
attention as before. Reading, math and
science are promoted as essential, because
testing is easily standardized, but little
thought is given to what options this limited
curriculum will give students later in life.
A student, for instance, that excels in
science, but has little experience of cultural
history, art or creative design, may lack
certain skills that would allow her to choose a
career in astronomy, because she will have
learned to focus on what she “can know”,
which means what she already knows, and be
intimidated by a field of study that goes far
beyond her life experience. But a student who
spent her childhood playing the cello, while
getting by in math and science, might find
herself drawn to and daring enough to con-
template a future that involves studying and
redefining the cosmos.
These intangibles have real value for any
community: the more capable and dynamic
the future of a community’s people, the more
prosperous and stable that community itself
will be. Another way to say it is: good schools
breed stability and prosperity, and every
community’s children should have the same
right to a good education that they have to
clean public parks, fresh air, and a life free of
gunfire and danger.
Cutting arts and music from schools
erodes the future of children whose options
for study are limited to those schools. Such
cuts are often justified by a falsifying market
psychology that says the wealthy should not
have to think of “the greater good” of society
when spending their public funds, but in fact,
the cuts are justified by the claim that it is in
the interest of “the greater good” that public
funds not be spent on certain communities.
Ultimately, the logic is circular, the
justification is shoddy, and the claim that the
refusal of those who have enough to build the
social fabric through public programs is a
moralizing contribution to “the greater good”
quickly runs into a celebration of bias and a
callous disregard for future outcomes. In
other words, we need to think twice before we
target defenseless children for ideologically
motivated spending cuts.
What’s more, there is no evidence that
these sort of cuts help to improve the lives of
people anywhere. It’s a now versus then
mentality, which says we can safely deprive
the future of its needed quality of life in order
to have an easier time holding onto what we
have now. We don’t need to invest wisely; we
can just keep what we have and celebrate
ourselves in the process.
76
We do, however, have evidence that by
reducing the range of quality educational
options for students in a given community,
we can destabilize that community econom-
ically, erode its public spaces, deprive its
residents of productive leisure time which
can be devoted to maintaining the fabric of
community, and we can drive rates of anti-
social and criminal behavior up, while
shutting down businesses that complement
the higher quality education that should have
been available.
Specifics? Charter schools are great, for
those who get to use them. But no solution is
satisfactory that leaves a majority of students
with no access to high-quality, state-of-the-
art educational programs. Charter schools
can never be treated as anything other than a
testing ground, where best practices can be
discerned and then distributed through the
standard educational system. If we can only
find funding for the charter schools, then we
are failing.
Curricula? No serious school should be
“teaching to the test” in order to promote a
mechanical increase in standardized test
scores: the only worthwhile increase in test
scores is the one that comes from having
promoted real intellectual curiosity, real
breadth of basic knowledge and a well-
rounded experience of what society knows:
not just reading, science and math, but
history, civics, ethics, literature, critical
thinking, music, art, phys-ed and foreign
language.
We have to begin any discussion of
education policy by thinking about what we
want to build into the future of our society.
And we have to consider that our society is
not a landscape of isolated villages and
disparate demographics that never have to
mix and have no responsibility to one
another. We expect all communities to respect
the same laws and honor one another’s right
to life and liberty, so we cannot shape those
laws to then discriminate against com-
munities that need to tap the benefits of
being part of a commonwealth more than
others do.
Building a generative economic future,
one in which our investments actually pay
back higher returns than we put in, means
considering how we contribute to the building
of the fabric of a functioning, humane, stable,
civilized public space. All people need and
deserve a public space in which community
and individual are part of a virtuous feedback
loop. We cannot do this if our approach is
more punitive than constructive; we cannot
do this if we ignore how flippant cuts to other
communities’ funding might be rooted in
flawed mystical assumptions and perversions
of the concept of natural selection.
Build better schools, and children will fill
them. Build opportunity, and children will
rise to it. Build a future of diverse options,
77
and children will grow into more diverse and
complete citizens. Build community, and
those who inhabit the community will
flourish. We can say we don’t want to throw
good money after bad, but we can’t make
good policy by smearing whole communities
with the bad that is our bad policy. When
educators, administrators, budget managers
and publishing companies that sell the tests,
restructure a program of study to make it
appear as if education is happening, when in
fact the best of what education can be is
being skirted in service of a self-reinforcing
logic of punitive test-score analysis and
tactical deprivation, the “soft bigotry of low
expectations is being intensified and expan-
ded, not made into a thing of the past.
We have to build stronger, more vibrant
futures, for all children, by making sure we
spend, and spend wisely—spend to invest,
not to purchase retroactively the legitimacy of
unsound political arguments. We have to take
seriously the fundamental rights and trans-
cendent human dignity of every student: that
means we must give them the tools to
perform, the information they need to
perform and the opportunity to actually
perform, as complete human beings, with
integral and sovereign intellects, making
critical judgments and creative choices, at
every step of the way along their educational
journey, a journey we should expect will not
end at graduation from this or that level of
conventional schooling. We know how to do
this, and it starts with privileging the
intangibles: those segments of the human
character and intellect that foster develop-
ment of ethical understanding, compre-
hensive language ability and compositional
potential in the expression of ideas, including
in the visual arts, in music performance and
composition and in the art of movement. If we
do not provide access to music, to art, to
thoughtful expression through language, we
are not empowering students to rise to the
highest heights of their abilities, or even to
recognize that a given challenge—as yet not
apparent to student, teacher or parent—
might be theirs to take on.
If we cut the education of intangibles and
transcendent humanizing values from our
curriculum, we degrade our students’ future
potential; if we empower them to recognize
where there is real value in the exercise of
their character and their abilities, they will
rise to the challenge of building a better
future for all of us.
NOTE: The Winter 2012-2013 edition of the Hot
Spring Quarterly will include a G.O.O.D.-based
education report. The value of arts and music
programs, of access to ideas and to new ways of
thinking, to thinking itself, needs to be better
understood, better assessed and better protected,
and we are looking for ways to begin to show this.
78
Poetry of the Future Libraryby Joseph Lucia
In the two following poems, Joseph Lucia
explores the existential crisis inherent in
crossing over a conceptual threshold in our
relationship to information, and explains what
might be the functional “afterlife” of libraries.
Below the City
Below the city, something’s amiss in the
mud-
choked sloughs where industrial flotsam
abuts
asphalt and airport, the camouflaged
dwelling places of slick-furred rodents,
a borderland that hints you can’t
go back though the path forward requires
a shrink-wrap agreement about the future
tense of any sentence you might serve
without parole. There are no acceptable
outcomes
when unnamed effluents from the chemical
plant’s
hot retort are seen as gifts by those who
count—
no malice in their mannered sweet platitudes,
their words deemed nourishment not
poisoned air.
All our bad politicians meaning all of them
should be buried here or at least dropped off
alone by a late night taxi driver who can’t find
any address like the one scrawled on a Post-it
note
and passed hand to hand in spite of Google
maps.
Technology won’t save you from malformed
visions,
the self-induced calamities some might call
fate, messenger RNA failing its functions,
receptor
sites slow on the uptake letting bad stuff, lots
of it,
happen at the molecular level. You can’t
imagine
what goes on down there without complex
formulas
and a degree in Genetics. Many will try to tell
you
knowledge won’t help. But in lost versions of
the truth
there’s still a vestige of conscience about
facts,
though facts never matter to the faithful
who won’t accept any possible distinction
between what’s up and what’s down in the
old
implausible cosmologies , the troubled stories
that always were just preventive medicine
for common terrors, for wakefulness at 3 a.m.
when quivering inner voices reveal anxieties
we can’t deny, denial itself the antidote for
loss.
Somehow we know we won’t escape or do
otherwise,
returning by compulsion to these outlands,
79
the places we pass by on the way to other
places,
rejectamenta littering the roadside,
reclamation sites
operating their loud, violent equipment all
day,
crushing wrecked cars, chewing up defunct
appliances,
even the old Kenmores that made homes
outposts
of reliability. Seeming alive in their hydraulic
frenzy,
elegantly engineered robotic claws feed scrap
iron
into the maw of a machine that compresses
and reforms it, yielding postmodern raw
material,
dense cubes of refuse that will somewhere
again become
fresh objects of desire. Who knows where
they end up,
the recuperated wastes fundamental to our
self-regard:
yes, we can figure out ways to amend wrongs
by making more stuff, by low-cost
manufacturing of
illusory goods. That’s the job of marketing
but also the whole megillah of our fevered
romance,
the lovely stupefaction by which we live. What
are we
willing to do other than seek paralysis by
argument?
The politics of rage is just another face for
this junkyard
culture, for our refusal to see ugliness at the
margins
as ugliness in the heart. Our cars keep
running
on the worn down highways. Most of us
ignore
the rust on bridges and don’t care that
there’s no more
American steel. But you can still smell it in
the air
if you sniff really hard, the rank sulfurous
odor
of the dead mills. The big plants are gone, the
ones
producing heavy stuff. But the commitment
continues
elsewhere, in our chemical obsessions, in the
black spew
we turn to energy so our motors keep
running
even though there’s a parasite eating us from
within.
The beauty of it is we always find amusement
in witnessing slow cataclysm and eventual
demise.
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The Afterlife of Libraries
When the shelves are dismantled, the
visitations begin,
brief ghostly apparitions of recycled volumes
in a remote corner of the upper stacks
where the Qs were, crowded but less
visited than some of the more welcoming
books,
the ones down in the Ps unburdened by a
tumult
of formulas, the deltas and thetas
that are just Greek to students who spend
more time daydreaming than doing labs.
There, above the reinforced concrete floor
that supported the old weight of knowledge,
in the red glow of the Exit signs, the lost
empirical tomes assert their quantum
prerogative
to flicker back into existence for a picosecond
and to shed their complex words into the
mute air
riddled with signals, the layered protocols
running
on staggered frequencies and bearing the
disembodied
syllables that could be the soul of thought.
Unexplained interferences start to interrupt
the dependable performance of mobile
devices,
a perfect storm of untethered content
appearing
in fragments on bright sharp touch screens
where people see their faces reflected as
background
to whatever they read. A woman looking at
weather.com
has several sentences on Analysis of Variance
inserted at the bottom of her display, just
above
the navigation icons. A guy using his golf GPS
app
gets equations defining the photoelectric
effect
overlaid on a contour map of the seventh
green.
A kid playing Pokemon online is puzzled
by the description of glutamine synthesis
scrawled across the gym floor. It happens at
random,
this networked dispersion of facts and
discourse
into the cellular ether where people graze
bits of information they need for a minute
without realizing the matrix of mind and
culture
has been un-housed and rendered formless,
and flows
now through buildings, over mountains and
rivers
without destination, without an endpoint
in the binding physical artifact that is its past
perfect
home. But information wants to be more
than free.
It wants to matter and last, to counter
entropy
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with the order of classified things, as if
blooming
out of the multi-verse there could in fact be
pure forms,
ideal manifestations of all the ways we know
revealed in what we held as books but what
are instead
in this altered place shadow beings from a
gone world,
a world where fingers made a tacit pact with
signs
pressed into paper: that we can embrace
thought
and witness its slow accretion, that we can
take
pleasure or solace in the long corridors full
of others’ words that enlighten and humble
us. Suddenly
it seems there’s a corrective impulse in the
curled up
dimensions at the Planck distance, the
hidden-then-revealed
bridges across unmeasured magnitudes
of space and time: hints that the old
collections persist
somewhere and foam up into being again
here,
breaking through the welter of digital
distractions,
giving hope to those who remember the
weight of pages
and the contract with the future of a few
strong words
emblazoned on all the various and durable
spines.
The Author
Joseph Lucia is director of the Falvey
Memorial Library, at Villanova University, in
Villanova, Pennsylvania. With his team, he is
developing new programmatic models, and
new tools and technology (used worldwide),
for the digital age library.
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