concocted glimpse

“The real problem with cars is not that they don’t get enough miles to the gallon; it’s that they make it too easy to spread out” (48, cf. 104). Green Metropolis gave me an expanded understanding of the infrastructure of a car. Cars fuel all kinds of infrastructure. Zoning laws are fueled by cars. It’s hard to zone the sort of neighborhood where you can walk to where you need to go. Sprawl — fueled by cars! — derails public transit since successful public transit requires not willpower but a critical population density (98, 119-20). We’re struggling with this in my neighborhood right now.

“With the home and the workplace separated, often by long car commutes, two well-serviced developments are created with duplicate retail, service, and parking institutions” (111). [Sounds like the infrastructure of divorce.] Parking institutions are my least favorite. They’re a concrete illustration of how “No one who moves into a new suburban subdivision pays anything like the real cost of the infrastructure that is required to support them” (258, cf. 102-3). Parking lots have to be lit even when unoccupied, and that takes insane wattage. Empty lots are crime magnets.

It’s our cars that stand between us and solutions to our gathering energy nightmare. And it’s easy to see why. … A car is speed and sex and power and emancipation.

And everyone’s a little driven by one of those.

A man named Otto lives in a house with a spouse and 2.3 children in an exurb of Seattle. Otto jokes his family has as many cars as it has children. One kiddie caravan, one sporty sport car, one scooter. Otto feels he has an appropriate amount of guilt over his gasoline consumption, but also feels he takes appropriate steps to mitigate his footprint. He’ll happily show off one of his big steps: Otto thinks that his scooter is pretty green. Pretty sustainable. Pretty good for the environment.

It’s not.

(A) The scooter cannot sustain even a quarter of the basic transportation trips of the family. David Suzuki suggests buying the smallest vehicle that sustains a household’s daily trips and renting vehicles of other capacities for special trips.

(B) It’s an extra vehicle. Extra. What is green about extra? Its production, its upkeep, its storage and its disposal are not greener than making the scooter trips in the family car. Buying a second smaller house isn’t green in the same way.

(C) It still requires the infrastructure of a car. It needs a garage, coming and going. It’s a perpetuation of and contribution — it’s not a solution — to solo highway travel.

(D) Because the scooter is more efficient, Otto will use it more, not less. It’s the Jevons Paradox: when efficiency goes up, consumption goes way up. When coal became more efficient than wood, people didn’t use less coal.

In fact, yesterday morning Otto took his scooter out into nature, to enjoy nature. That makes sense: Leisure trips are the first way to increase use of a leisure vehicle.

Otto oughta read Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability. It’s not what he drives every day, it’s that he drives every day. Environmentally, “In the long run, miles matter more than miles per gallon” (48, cf. 104). This “doesn’t mean that inefficient cars are a good thing. But it does suggest that increasing the energy efficiency of our machines will not, in the long run, deliver the kind of environmental benefits that are often predicted for it” (98). The scooter is a better bad thing. It’s Wendy’s, not McDonald’s.

Lately I feel like I’m living near an aviary. Birdsong is everywhere. There’s even a new call I don’t recognize. For the most part I don’t see any of the chorus birds. I see murders and kits of the the usual; crow, pigeon, crow, pigeon, the odd robin. Except. The other day when I was running I ran by a ruby throated hummingbird! And early this week a chickadee waged war with its reflection in our kitchen window. Rosc read that a black silhouette cutout of a bird of prey would keep it from flying into the window. I had no time to cut out a kestrel before leaving the house, so I taped up an interim scarecrow: parts of Comcast and AT&T bills, the creepiest papers I had on hand. It did the trick.

Friday: Dal soup. Authentic delivery. [Sikh.] Saturday: Tea at the Panama Hotel. Peppermint for him, peach blossom for me. Un toujours dans le jamais. Sunday: Tradition! Easter Brunch at Ivar’s! Cheesecake, crab legs, long buttery vegetables. Monday: I invented a new breakfast: raita on cheerios! Delish. Tuesday: Was Wild Ginger where I fell in love with gyoza? I think so. Also, Spiceberry tea. Wednesday: Asparagus in black bean sauce. Thursday: Bún Thit Nuong (lacking proper diacritics here but lacking nothing at the table).

At work last summer I ran into an essay combining Paulo Freire’s banking concept of education and Mohammed Yunus’ work on poverty. I’d read Freire-focused essays before—one professor constantly assigns them—but this one made a big impression. I went home and read up on Yunus. A fundamental of his Grameen Foundation is loaning to women. I remembered my mom telling me about the research behind Yunus’ work many years before; studies that showed that when money was loaned to poor women in third world countries they handled it more responsibly than men. [Groceries, not beer. School, not brothels.]

A month later, when I found out about kiva.org, an online microfinance community that lends to the working poor in poor countries, I was ripe with interest. I discovered Kiva through a friend’s friend’s blog. I’d never ventured into any microfinance waters before, but I’d decided I wanted to make a loan to a working woman to celebrate Labor Day, and Kiva made it look easy. I researched it and decided it was reputable. I selected someone to loan to. I looked first for someone in the Townships in South Africa, but I couldn’t find anyone. So I changed my parameters and chose a woman my age. The loan’s nearly paid in full!

Another month later I found out through my local Kiva group that UW was hosting a lecture on microfinance by someone from Oikocredit. I signed up online to attend. The website spit up a string:

Your confirmation code is 9a4f72a4639b8626b8140b73ee89634d

I thought this was a ridiculous sort of confirmation code, so for kicks I read out the string to Roscivs, who was involved in his own task in the next room.”Huh,” he responded, “sounds like an MD5 hash.” A what? I found it very attractive that he recognized base sixteen at the drop of a hat out of context. [MD5 hash is, indeed, a ridiculous thing to use for an evening lecture registration code.] Free with my registration I got a lesson about collision resistance in cryptographic hashes. The microfinance lecture itself was almost as good. What I remember most about the evening is walking between the George Washington statue and the By George Café and finally getting the joke. Also, dozens of 8.5″x11″ pieces of paper were tenaciously taped on the bricky buildings in Red Square. [It's hard to tape anything to brick. I have tried it.] “DRAW ON ME”, they all said. I picked one and drew a tree.

My neighborhood has a walk score of 72. This makes my heart go pitter patter. And my feet, too, for that matter. I go to the grocery store, the library, a running trail, even my doctor’s office, all on foot. For everything else, I can walk to the transit station.

Transportation is a big issue to me. Last fall Metro launched its In Motion program. I participated. And I felt, more keenly than ever, the split between the suburbs and the city. I was told about this dynamic when I moved here: Seattle dwellers VS. the East Side/ the suburbs/ the namby pamby NIMBYs, willing to claim the glitz of the city but not the dirt, retreating [with private transportation] to their greenbelted homes in their monied school districts. I was promised I’d encounter this discord, and I have. I’ve picked up that apple and I’ve polished it. I have trouble stomaching the suburbians’ green, so purchased and plastic. I’m allergic to their (!) pollution. I wish that the ferry system here worked like a Roman barge. The ferry riders file into the galley and pick up an oar and work to get to the other shore. The ferry captain pipes some R&B over the sound system, something with an appropriate number of beats per minute. Beats driving to the gym and sitting at the rowing machine, right? Sweet, sweet fantasy, baby.

For the last five generations, all the women in my matriline have gone to college. Me, my mother, her mother, her mother, and my mother’s mother’s mother’s mother.

I’m proud of it.

I got two packages this week. One was a cardboard parcel snugly swaddling The Cello Suites: J. S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece. I have the highest hopes for it; I’ve heard the highest praise. The other was a flimsy envelope containing shards of plastic and a cracked CD case protecting a recording of Casals playing the Suites. I have a delicious plan to learn all about the Suites this way.

•

Beauty gathers beauty. My man Rostropovich has a recording of Anner Bylsma playing the Suites. In the peaceful movement of this morning he put it on to compare it to the new Casals we put on last night. We listened to the first two Suites doubly interleaved; Suite I, Prelude, Bylsma; Suite I, Prelude, Casals; … Suite II, Gigue, Bylsma; Suite II, Gigue, Casals. We are in love.

My sister-in-law Billie accrued significant debt while she was in college, a life choice she now rues. The other day she publicly posted this article and advised the college-bound in her network not to get student loans. A discussion resulted.

I was not under the impression that scholastic debt is all but ubiquitous for undergraduate degrees, but the others in the discussion suggested that it is. I deliberately used the term scholastic debt because of a distinction I made between taking out student loans and racking up consumer debt while in college—diamond rings¹, clothing, the must-have Apple product.

In the discussion, someone brought up college advertisements on TV promising “financial aid for those who apply” and targeting families who are hoping to send their first generation to college.

. .

This image activated my schema for advertising, education, school, and consumer goods, and in a constructivist synthesis that Piaget would be proud of, it occurred to me—this idea of college as consumerism². My previous distinction between debt types made less global sense.

College is like an iPhone.

(A) College, particularly in “ever greater amounts”, is an indicator of privilege³ more than it is a cause of privilege, like must-have Apple products.

(B) A college degree is a status commodity. And the more you have, the higher the status. Like those iWant Apple products.

(C) Most of all, college is not a sustainable educational process.

One of the professors at the college where I work assigns an advertisement analysis every quarter. Part of the assignment is to determine what the ad is really selling us on. The stereotrope is that cheap American lagers sell us on bikini babes. College sells us on any number of fulfillments, and if we buy into the idea that our purchase opens up to us a narrative we have not been able to create and sustain ourselves, it’s like buying bad beer.

. .

Everyone in the discussion was a Mormon woman. I started thinking about the Mormon women I know, Mormons by belief or by birth, and the way they consume college, and it seems to me that it’s especially wasteful. Some go to college classes like some women go to the mall, like others to the bottle. Bling for the brain. Anodyne for the mind. Buying [into] the idea that participating in this narrative gives them fulfilling involvement they have not been able to create in their lives.

Consume responsibly.

________________

¹ I went to BYU.

² consumerism: “a social and economic order that’s based on the systematic creation and fostering of a desire to purchase commodity goods in ever greater amounts”

³ cf. The Big Lie of the ‘Life of the Mind’, an article my boss posted.