Anti-colonialist architecture?

Collaborative Architecture in India

Are Biofuels a Social Work Issue?

"The stage is now set for direct competition for grain between the 800 million people who own automobiles, and the world's 2 billion poorest people. The risk is that millions of those on the lower rungs of the global economic ladder will start falling off as rising food prices drop their consumption below the survival level."

From Lester Brown's report to the U.S. Congress on ethanol, in which the agricultural economist and founder of the Earth Policy Institute as well as the Worldwatch Institute warns of an impending famine as competition stiffens for food and fuel.

Sustainability is complicated.

Crux

Why am I so caught up in thinking about both farming/gardening and social work/public administration; about they inform each other?

I think it is because both have been corrupted by the application of industrial ways of thinking and managing.

The education system is a case in point, as is petrochemical-reliant agriculture. We have turned the ecologies of people and plants into fragmented worlds managed by myopic specialistists. We have ceased paying attention to details, to effect, and lost our ability to respond creatively and locally in an empowered, informed, and effective way. Our vision for how the world should be has become uncoupled from how the world is. We think too small in some ways, and too big in others. We need to focus, be real, pay attention, do what works. We need to take responsibility for our lives, our livelihoods, the country and the world we live in. We have to depend on our land so we care for our land. We have to depend on each other so we care for each other. We need to work on a scale that works.

"Resilience" according to Rob Hopkins

"I think in many ways the idea of resilience is a more useful concept than the idea of sustainability. The idea of resilience comes from the study of ecology, and it's really about how systems, settlements, withstand shock from the outside; when they encounter shock from the outside, that they don't just unravel and fall to pieces.

"[Resilience] is about building modularity into what we do; building surge breakers into how we organize the basic things that support us."

From this TED Talk.

Fukuoka, Hayek, and the implications of "natural farming" for social work

To anyone who loves, appreciates, and values the natural world, Hayek's notion of a spontaneous order has a certain elegance, simplicity, and beauty to it, but it neglects the simple fact that such an order would undoubtedly replicate and extend current inequalities and injustices. I have been chewing this over, and found it wonderfully captured in this passage from Fukuoka's "One Straw Revolution":

"I settled myself on the mountain and everything went well up to the time that my father entrusted me with the richly-bearing trees in the orchard. He had already pruned the trees to 'the shape of sake cups' so that the fruit could easily be harvested. When I left them abandoned in this state, the result was that the branches became intertwined, insects attacked the trees and the entire orchard withered away in no time.

My conviction was that crops grow themselves and should not have to be grown. I had acted in the belief that everything should be left to take its natural course, but I found that if you apply this way of thinking all at once, before long things do not go so well. This is abandonment, not 'natural farming.'"

Similarly, to abandon people to the natural order of the free market is to allow the grotesque heirarchies and structures of privilege and oppression that humans have already created to flourish, to reach their "natural" conclusion - e.g., the primacy of certain groups of people over others.

Drayage blues

The cycle in which port truck drivers are stuck:

Costs are externalized from the shipping industry onto port truck drivers and the state. The drivers earn very little income, and, as independent contractors, have very little bargaining power and no health insurance. To compete for business, they reduce their costs by whatever means possible, generally running very old, dirty trucks. The surrounding communities bear the brunt of the pollution from these trucks. The surrounding communities are, of course, low-income communities. It goes without saying that the greater metropolitan area (and ultimately the atmosphere of our planet) suffer for the pollution, as well.

The port - charged with the responsibility of being an economic engine for Washington state - fears losing business to other, cheaper, west coast ports if the cost of shipping goes up as a result of increased driver wages and/or truck regulation. Their proposed solution is to use public money to subsidize a clean trucks program that will be only marginally effective, at best, rather than put the costs on the international shippers via fees at the port terminals. So, WalMart (for example) doesn't pay the real costs of shipping, and continues to use its profits to expand its own business, making it that more capable of out-competing its competitors as well as its own labor.

Moreover, the argument that WalMart is creating jobs is a fallacy. They are edging out smaller stores and replacing those jobs with their jobs. Their full-time employees earn on average under $20,000/year and must spend 20% of that income on health care before their insurance kicks in. It is clear that their incomes and their jobs are not doing much for the dynamism of our economy. The GDP grows, but so does inequality. The power and the resources accumulate at the top.

Thoughts on this?

"Further, an informed respondent is one who knows the benefits and negative externalities of a public good, and it therefore becomes easier for the respondent to accurately assess the maximum amount he/she is willing to pay for a good. Research has also demonstrated that informing respondents of the negative externalities of a good on society prior to surveying has a higher impact on the marginal WTP estimate than does informing respondents of the societal benefits of the good (Marette et al., 2004) That is, people respond more to the harm a good can cause than to the benefits that good may bring to society."

From here.

This makes me think about creating negative laws - can't do this, can't do that - rather than positive laws - must do this, must do that. This bears some resemblance to libertarian or Hayek-style laws for regulating the economy and other human affairs. There's some sense to it. Not being able to do something doesn't feel as controlling to people as having to do something.

With the exception, perhaps, of gun control. Hm, this needs further consideration....