Technology and Impotence

NASA satellite image of Gulf oil spill, May 17, 2010.

(This piece was published first at sf.streetsblog.org. I appreciate their consideration for my wanting to republish it here so soon.)

The BP oil spill goes on. And on. We watch the oil on live web cam pouring into the Gulf of Mexico. And we watch. Political rage is muted, practical responses even more distant. What to do? How do we “take action” on something like this? How can individuals meaningfully respond to this catastrophe? Stop driving? Boycott one brand of gas? Stop buying things made of plastic? Let’s not flatter ourselves. A few folks I know are planning to go to a local ARCO gas station (owned by BP) to protest, which will surely be a big moment for the minimum wage employee in the cash booth, and probably an irritant to the half dozen or more motorists waiting to fill their cars.

The numbing impotence we feel is painfully calibrated to our inability to affect what’s happening. Consumer choices we might make will have zero impact on this disaster, and can’t shape the larger dynamics of a globe-spanning, multinational oil industry either. Just listen to Democracy Now on Friday morning to hear how Chevron has destroyed thousands of square miles of the Nigerian delta in its incessant exploitation of the oil there, or how the Ecuadoran Amazon too is covered in vast lakes of spilled oil.

The deeper questions about technology and science are far from our daily lives. The world we live in is embedded in complex networks of technological dependencies, which none of us have chosen freely. Nor do any of us have any way to participate directly in deciding what technologies we will use, how they will be deployed, what kind of social controls will be exerted over private interests who organize and run them for their own gain, etc. (supposedly the federal government regulates them in the public interest, but that is clearly false as shown YET AGAIN by this disaster). The basic direction of science is considered a product of objective research and development, when it has always been skewed to serve the interests of those who already have economic and political power. Public, democratic direction for science and technology is not only non-existent, we really don’t even discuss it as a possibility!

British Petroleum should be given the death penalty. Oh wait! They don’t have death penalities for corporations. In fact, though they apparently have all the rights of individuals with respect to “free speech” (which they are free to buy at any price they wish), they cannot be held accountable as individuals for overtly criminal behavior. And even if they were, their bottom-line obsessing, litigation-phobic approach to the worst oil spill in history is just an example of normal corporate behavior in 2010. Their efforts to control press access and spin the story to their advantage have been consistent since the original accident, insisting on journalists being embedded on BP boats or planes so they can control what is seen and reported.

Penalizing corporate executives that get “caught” only legitimizes the rest of the criminal class in their everyday destruction of the planet. Maybe BP executives will be held criminally responsible (probably not), but the entity whose logic controls the behavior of anyone who is its executive is virtually immune. Unlike its political competitors in human form, the corporation is also apparently immortal.

The abject obeisance of the Obama government during the first 30 days of the oil geyser is a shame. Government ignorance and inaction, following the routine corruption that granted safety and environmental waivers to BP for this drilling project, should rock its legitimacy as much as Chernobyl did the Soviet government’s in 1986. I hope that blind faith in technology would also suffer a severe blow. Assurances about safe technology, proper failsafe guards, etc. are made about all our energy sources, from undersea oil drilling to nuclear power to the fictional “clean coal.” (Just last Tuesday I was speaking at a class at UC Santa Cruz where a couple of earnest students tried to argue that nuclear power was the solution to global warming!) This oil geyser resembles nothing so much as an uncontrollable nuclear meltdown. But rather than radiating thousands of square miles of countryside as happened in the Ukraine in 1986, this is filling the Gulf of Mexico with billions of gallons of crude oil. The sea is already dying, which is beginning to cascade into seaside communities and economies. The death of the Gulf will have unknown further effects on weather, ocean ecology, bird migration, and much more, and that’s before the massive underwater oil plume reaches the gulf stream in the Atlantic and does even more damage. It’s an insane, unwanted experiment in a foreseeable and preventable ecological catastrophe of unprecedented scope and severity.

Turns out that BP is closer to us, in a bigger way, than a lot of folks realize. Only a couple of years ago BP and the University of California at Berkeley signed a $500 million deal that will build a new biofuels research institute at the school, to be managed by BP and it is to BP that all patent discoveries will go. Obama’s Energy Secretary Steven Chiu was the UC official who made the deal. Now his deputy energy secretary is the former chief scientist for BP! Maybe folks who want to protest this disaster should explore an alliance with the dynamic student movement that has already been in motion since last fall. Protest and obstruction do have their place.

Nature in the City's new proposal for a 10-mile "wild" corridor.

But other things are afoot in San Francisco too of a more affirmative nature. A couple of weeks ago the Public Utilities Committee of the Board of Supervisors held a well-attended public hearing regarding new ways of working with local water supplies from ground water and storm water to rain catchment and graywater. On Wednesday night Nature in the City presented their new campaign for a Bioregional Park (5 MB pdf!) in the heart of San Francisco, a long-term feature of which is a 10-mile corridor that sweeps from the Presidio in the north down the spine of the City’s major peaks and then angling east across McLaren Park to Bayview Hill and Candlestick Point.  A natural corridor that knits together as many existing open spaces and parks as possible, planted with native plants to restore basic habitat for local critters, bugs and plants, would also help them to migrate through the urban environment. Bikeways, hiking paths, even daylighted creeks could be part of this.

And the SF Bike Coalition just announced their new campaign Connecting the City” San Francisco’s Crosstown Bikeways for All (which is not as ambitious” after all these years” as a modest little flyer I put out in 1987 calling for a City of Panhandles). So far it’s a campaign to raise money, but it demonstrates a willingness to finally push for a more serious challenge to the dominance of private cars over our public streets. It’s a campaign that dovetails nicely with the notion of a wild corridor, new ways to think about watersheds and underground creeks, and more. It’s welcome development for the bigger agenda of altering how we live.

Ultimately these small choices are the only way we CAN start to lay a new foundation, technologically and socially, for a real transformation of life that will preclude disasters of the magnitude in the Gulf. A materially comfortable life for all should be the goal of a creative and energetic campaign of social and technological re-invention so that we radically reduce our use of energy, water, and other materials.

Combining the various incipient insurgencies for other uses of public streets, maybe we can start by getting some accurate numbers. What percentage of the land area of San Francisco is covered in public streets? What percentage of that street area is dedicated to cars as opposed to bicycles, pedestrians, or even transit lines (obviously buses use the same streets as cars, but not nearly as many streets as cars; nor do they generally park curbside)? What percentage is open space, parklands, sidewalk gardens, etc.? What are the largest contiguous zones of open lands not built on in some fashion?

I propose that once we get the numbers, which we can only guess at now, it will be possible to raise the demand for a specific percentage of city streets being permanently turned over to new uses, including daylighting subterranean waterways, building city-spanning parkways for crosstown bicycling, walking, and for the critters, scurrying and slithering. Whaddya think? Five percent of the streets converted to new auto-free uses? 10 percent? 25 percent? How far can we go?

Our era is characterized by a profound impotence in the face of national and global breakdowns. We don’t have a political vision, let alone a movement of movements, ready for prime time. We have to build the capacity to reinvent life one block, one neighborhood, one city at a time. The good news is that thousands of your friends and neighbors are already involved in just these efforts. Paul Hawken in his book “Blessed Unrest” identifies 30 million grassroots environmental organizations around the world! He calls them the immune system for Earth. Let’s hope the immune system will behave like our own bodily immune systems, and start killing the threats to our global health, the corporations that left unchecked will certainly kill us and everything else on the planet.

4 comments to Technology and Impotence

  • Johng657

    I loved your blog article. Really Cool.

  • Martin

    The great purpose of these ill-commented-upon-essays is that they bang around in a few people’s heads, not with a million hits, but with undeniable force and integrity.
    The problem for me is that I continue to get my nihilism reinforced while then having my scorn for righteous uplift also excited. As the first commenter noted, your first few paragraphs are dead accurate, noting the supersystem’s power of having achieved, in Carl Boggs’ term, an “anti-politics.”  Towards the end, however, you veer back towards the comfort of “small” and banal ego-enhancing resistance as some sort of counterweight.  If the “corporation” is, as you posit, “truly immortal,” and BP and Massey are currently clicking profits and looking toward a radiant future, that should be a sobering truth, not a cause to break out the peace signs and dance to the Dave Matthews Band.
    You precisely nailed our predicament in your first few paragraphs. Surely there’s some glory in that.

  • ccarlsson

    Thanks Gerry! important rejoinder, and thanks for letting me off the hook of that impossible and all-too-narrow choice! Something more confrontational and antagonistic has to be tried, but there’s always the problem of the disconnected angry mob having its super radical impulsive moment, then going down to police repression and spending a lot of time and money enmeshed in the Incarceration State. Sometimes that can’t be avoided, but it does make sense to me to build our strength in lots of ways before we embark on that John Brown-ish approach… the notion of the Exemplary Act leading to a cascading rebellion just doesn’t sound plausible to me these days, the atomization is so severe. I think in these small choices you also herald we see the slow recomposition of the class, of we who can act together for a different way of life. To be sure, your point is well taken that if we only do it in the Mission, or in SF, and the rest of the world goes on unchallenged, it’s not way different than a better-than-worse consumer choice. I think it’s really interesting to explore what an “industrial policy” might be, where as you suggest a CSA links to a “vital industry” (which ones are vital? How do they operate now? How could they be transformed towards ecological sanity? etc.) and we radically alter the logic of our current existence… anyway, thanks for advancing the conversation!
    –cc

  • Gerry

    “Consumer choices we might make will have zero impact on this disaster…”
    or
    “Ultimately these small choices are the only way we CAN start to lay a new foundation, technologically and socially, for a real transformation of life that will preclude disasters of the magnitude in the Gulf..” ??
    Which is it Chris? I know trying to expand parks is not exactly the same thing as a consumer approach, but… even if we green the cities, the processed world clanks on just beyond, it just takes you longer to drive around it… Sure we need a model, ideas catch on, especially when people see us basking in our green spaces, eating local food trucked in by bicycle carts…. But at least among the people I’ve been talking to, I think the “obstruction” suggestion is more in tune with the general outrage…It occurred to me that if a diverse group of maybe 40-50 heavily armed Louisiana fishermen stormed the white house (and maybe a TV station) and said they were taking over this country in the name of the earth and being able to survive on it, a LOT of people would be sympathetic.
    Again, where is the connection between the back-to-the-land people and the proletarian internationalists?  (Wait, this could be you!) How about a Community Supported Agriculture project linked to a vital industry – to act as the emergency strike food bank?  Maybe the Union of the Unemployed and their Friends (UUF) would go for it… Small choices add up quickly when they literally make the gears stop…

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