Towards survival – For Litter’s Sake

From: Towards Survival issue 19: A Journal of Sustainable Policies – January/February 1974

FOR LITTER’S SAKE

containers marked EASILY

DISPOSABLE

float permanently on pools.

letters proclaiming perennial loves

are too temptingly brittle to keep

from the fire.

we retain what is useless-

destroy the essential.

who knows what – to whom –

means

one or the other?

might not a container be fingered in warm surroundings,

or a letter – profound though it

looks-

tender shallows of affection?

if we laid no hand on possessions

of others

our land would be littered.

a reason for litter – perhaps.

by Jenny Johnson

trails through the anti-city

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1960s, 1970s, anonymous state apparatus, anti-city, atomised living, Blueprint for a Communal Environment, capitalism, capitalist, city, communal, community, consumption, counter culture, environment, environmental, People's Architecture, prevailing system, radicalism, social crisis, social ecology, society, values

Today’s article is taken from a publication called ‘consernus’ from 1973. I’m really interested to know what your thoughts are on this… Historically, radicalism found an almost exclusive locus in the factory and proletariat. The fact that the city and the workplace could have been integrated in a unified realm of critique and reconstruction occurred to only a few radical theorists of the last century, notably Kropotkin and Morris. Yet the worker does not exist merely in a factory milieu and her or his social experiences are not exhausted at the point of production. The proletarian is not only a class being but also an urban being. Capitalism generates a broad social crisis that often makes workers more accessible to revolutionary visions as urban dwellers – as victims of pollution, congestion, isolation, real estate extortion, neighbourhood decay, bad transportation, civic manipulation and the spiritually dehumanising effects of megapolitan life – than as exploited producers of surplus value. The 60s are unique in that the concept of community began to develop on a broad popular scale – indeed, a largely generational scale – when young people in considerable numbers re-oriented themselves towards reconstructive utopistic projects of their own. New values were formulated that often involved a total break with the commodity system and charted the way to new forms of sociation – values and forms that have since been grouped as the ‘counter culture’. The young people who began to formulate these values unquestionably comprised a privileged social stratum. Why didn’t these people like so many previous generations take up the basic values of their parents and expand the area of privilege they had inherited? The question reveals an historic change in the material premises for radical social movements in advanced capitalist countries. By the 60s, technology in the ‘First World’ had advanced to a point where the values spawned by material scarcity no longer seemed morally or culturally relevant. The work ethic, the moral authority imputed to material denial, parsimony and sensual renunciation, the high social value placed on competition and ‘free enterprise’, the emphasis on privatisation and individuation based on egotism, seemed obsolete in the light of technological achievements that afforded entirely social disposition oriented towards community and the full expression of individual human powers. Large numbers of this drop-out youth, exultant in their newly-discovered sense of liberation, lacked an awareness of the harsh fact that complete freedom is impossible in a prevailing system of unfreedom. Insofar as they hoped rapidly to replace the dominant culture by their own merely on the strength of example and moral suasion, they failed. But insofar as they began to see themselves as the most advanced sector of a larger movement to revolutionise society, their culture has a compelling relevance as part of an historic enlightenment that eventually may change every aspect of social life. Generally, for the counter-cultural planners, the point of departure for any design was not the extent to which the city expedites traffic, communication and economic activities. Rather, they were primarily occupied with the relationship of design to the fostering of personal intimacy, many-sided social relationships, non-hierarchical modes of organisation, communistic living arrangements and material independence from the market economy. Among the many plans of this kind developed in the late 60s and early 70s was one formulated in Berkeley by an ad hoc group from People’s Architecture, the local Tenants Union and members of the local food co-op. The thrust of their plan entitled ‘Blueprint for a Communal Environment’ is radically counter-cultural. ‘The revolutionary culture gives us new communal, eco-viable ways of organising our lives, while people’s politics gives us the means to resist the System.’ It’s goal is ‘communal ways of organising our lives (to) help to cut down on consumption, to provide for basic human needs more efficiently, to resist the system, to support ourselves and overcome the misery of atomised living.’ The planners see the realisation of these concepts as the first steps towards to re-orienting the individual self from a passive acceptance of isolation and dependence on bureaucratic institutions to popular initiatives that will recreate communal contacts and face-to-face networks of mutual aid. 

Think Little

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1970s, article, enviornment, publication, think little

THINK LITTLE

My Dad gave me a catalogue published in 1971 called ‘The Last Whole Earth Catalog: access to tools’ and an article in it really struck me as having some pertinence today. I thought I’d post short installments for you – see what you think. People have been saying the same things for years…

(Image Source: talvellaaurinko, via pantslady on tumblr)

Think Little

by Wendell Berry

First there was Civil Rights, and then there was The War, and now it is The Environment. The first two of this sequence of causes have already risen to the top of the nation’s consciousness and declined somewhat in a remarkably short time. I mention this in order to begin with what I believe to be a justifiable skepticism. For it seems to me that the Civil Rights Movement and the Peace Movement, as popular causes in the electronic age, have partaken far too much of the nature of fads. Not for all, certainly, but for too many they have been the fashionable politics of the moment. As causes they have been undertaken too much in ignorance; they have been too much simplified; they have been powered too much by impatience and guilt of conscience and short-term enthusiasm, and too little by an authentic social vision and long-term conviction and deliberation. For most people those causes have remained almost entirely abstract; there has been too little personal involvement, and too much involvement in organisations which were insisting that other organisations should do what was right.

There is considerable danger that the Environment Movement will have the same nature: that it will be a public cause, served by organisations that will self-righteously criticize and condemn other organisations, inflated for a while by a lot of public talk and media, only to be replaced in its turn by another fashionable crisis. I hope that will not happen, and I believe there are ways to keep it from happening, but I know that if this effort is carried on solely as a public cause, if millions of people cannot or will not undertake it as a private cause as well, then it is sure to happen. In five years the energy of our present concern will have petered out in a series of public gestures – and no doubt in a series of empty laws –  and a great, and perhaps the last, human opportunity will have been lost.

It need not be that way. A better possibility is that the movement to preserve the environment will be seen to be, as I think it has to be, not a digression from the civil rights and peace movements , but the logical culmination of those movements. For I believe that the separation of these three problems is artificial. They have the same cause, and that is the mentality of greed and exploitation. The mentality that exploits and destroys the natural environment is the same that abuses racial and economic minorities, and imposes on young men the tyranny of the military draft, that makes war against peasants and women and children with the indifference of technology. The mentality that destroys a watershed and then panics at the threat of flood is the same mentality that gives institutionalized insult to black people and then panics at the prospect of race riots. It is the same mentality that can mount deliberate warfare against a civilian population and then express moral shock at the logical consequence of such warfare at My Lai. We would be fools to believe that we could solve any one of these problems without solving the others.