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 Special Supplement to the October 2001 issue: A report on the proceedings of the Metropolis West Conference, February 7+8, 2001, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, "Finding the Thread of Sustainability." October 2001
In India they're below their quota-they're able to generate about nine-tenths of a ton of greenhouse gases; in Germany it's about 12 tons per person, in Japan it's about nine tons, and in America it's about 20 tons. Now to make this thing work, you have to make sure that there are enough poor people in the world who don't drive cars and burn coal. As long as they stay poor enough, billions of them, we can have 20 tons per person. The only trouble with that is that you can't have a global economy without selling to more markets. So the economic imperative is to have these lower producing and consuming people adapt our particular style as rapidly as they can. And that's the whole purpose of the World Trade Organization and the World Bank. So when we talk about sustainability the test is, can the world reduce to producing two tons or less of greenhouse gases per person? And that means about a 90 percent reduction in the throughput (manufacturing, use, throw-away, recycling, and so on). That's what some people call Factor Ten: you have to reduce by a factor of ten if you're going to make any impact at all-and that would be sustainability.
In terms of the national agenda, it's barely an issue. Bush hardly mentioned it. Gore spent little time on it. And he might have been right, by the way, from a political point of view; his people said the reason he lost West Virginia was because he'd mentioned the Clean Air Act. Since they have a lot of coal mines there that was viewed unthinkable. Other people say it's because he wanted to confiscate guns and West Virginia likes guns; I don't know. What I do know is that there has been no significant national debate about sustainability. In Oakland I'm trying to get more people to live in an urban area, close in, because they are driving farther and farther-40, 50 miles a day. The reason for that is that if you go to a field outside Oakland, a field where there are only cows-they're a lot easier to deal with than people. But if you build in town, people don't like shadows, they don't like change-or any alteration of neighborhood character. There's talk of smart growth, of no sprawl but in-fill. The problem with that is that people who live near a potential infill site don't want any growth. So smart growth isn't smart at all, because when you try to do it, they fight you-they climb right over you. Half of the real estate goes to the car. We house our cars, we house our cars and garage our people. Think about that. We have to get people out of the car, and to do that we have to live vertically. And living vertically is expensive-and you have to like your neighbors. We're living in a hyperprivatized world where we don't have to share too much. Paolo Soleri, who has a visionary idea of three-dimensional cities, wrote that his living room is the street. You give people small space-prime space-and generous public spaces where they can carry on their lives. Randy Hayes: About a hundred years ago, my great-uncle Rutherford B. Hayes was elected president of the United States by one electoral vote after having lost the popular vote, and he said something very interesting. He said that we no longer have, as envisioned by the founding fathers, the democracy of the Constitution. What we have is a country of the corporation, by the corporation, and for the corporation. We need to achieve a greater degree of democracy if we're going to achieve our dreams of sustainability. So I'll be spending a lot of time this year setting up meetings with the boards of directors of social-change groups around the country. I'll be talking to human rights groups, civil rights groups, women's groups, student groups, environmental groups. I'll be asking them to put campaign-finance reform on their agenda, to dedicate staff and time and resources to try to achieve an end to campaign-finance corruption. Without a far better democracy, we can't achieve sustainability. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: On Capitol Hill they love to talk about returning control to the states. The states, they say, are in the best position to control their own environmental resources. But community control sometimes becomes corporate control. In the Hudson Valley we remember the 1960s version of community control. At that time the General Electric Company ran the valley. They came to impoverished towns like Glens Falls and said to the town fathers, "We're going to build you a new factory, bring you 1,500 jobs, raise your tax base. All you have to do is waive your environmental laws and let us dump our toxic PCBs [polychlorinated biphenyls] into the Hudson. If you don't let us do it, we're going to New Jersey and do it from there." Glens Falls to took the bait. Two decades later GE closed its factory and fired the workers. They left town with their pockets stuffed with cash, and left behind a $2 million cleanup bill. I know a thousand fishermen-my clients-who are permanently out of work. The Hudson is loaded with fish, but the fish are still loaded with GE's PCBs and are too toxic to sell in the market. The traffic on the upper river has dried up because the channels are too toxic to dredge. And all the land that was occupied by the GE factories-beautiful storefront property, with tax breaks from the grateful locality-is now permanently off the tax base. The community's source of revenue and recreation is fenced off. Every woman between Oswego and Albany has elevated levels of PCB in her breast milk. Every one of us in the valley has GE's PCBs in our organs. The federal laws are meant to put an end to this kind of corporate blackmail. These environmental laws have really democratized our country and given us community control. If anyone tries to put an incinerator, landfill, or some obnoxious facility in your backyard, you could probably stop them if you want to devote your life's energy to it. You have a right to a hearing, to call witnesses, and to cross-examine them, and so on. And if there's a polluter in your backyard or the government fails to prosecute, anybody can step into the shoes of the United States attorney and drag the polluter in front of a federal judge and penalize him for $25,000 a day for every day he pollutes. We have the right to know the laws that make industry and government transparent. The laws force them to tell us what they are doing in our community. [Ed. Note. On August 1, 2001, the federal Environmental Protection Agency ordered GE to spend $460 million to clean up 40 miles of the Hudson river's bottom.] |
