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May 31, 2010
Whole, whole on the range
My toughest work this year has been serving on the jury of this year’s Buckminster Fuller Challenge. Our work has been demanding because we’ve had to assess high quality entries that range from the use of social media to organize urban food systems, and transforming Chicago into a giant water treatment machine; to helping Indian women solar electrify their own villages, and the use of cattle to reverse the spread of deserts around the world.
But the experience has also been uplifting. As a jury, we were instructed to look for a “bold, visionary, but tangible initiative that addresses a well-defined need of critical importance” – and we have been spoiled for choice. Our winner, who will be announced on 2 June at the National Press Club in Washington DC, will receive a $100,000 prize to support the development and implementation of their work. I can't be there myself, so my contribution is write about some of the finalists over the coming days and weeks - starting with....
[Photo borrowed from Fast Company]
A quarter of the land area of Earth is turning into desert. Three quarters of the planet’s savannas and grasslands are degrading. And because the main activity on rangelands is grazing livestock, on which 70% of the world’s poorest people depend, grassland deterioration therefore causes widespread poverty.
All this impacts on climate change, too. According to Richard Douthwaite, who leads the Carbon Cycles and Sinks Network, agriculture and land-use emissions are 27% of global total of harmful emissions. [Douthwaite’s network is developing policies which will enable the Irish land mass to become a carbon sink rather than a source of greenhouse emissions. His organization, the Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability (Feasta) was instrumental in the invitation to Allan Savory to give a lecture at Trinity College, Dublin which may bee seen online here ]
Grassland degradation is not a new problem. Decay started when the first hominids discovered the tool of fire and, by burning grasses, destroyed nutrients that would otherwise have enriched the soil. But the rate of degredation has accelerated with the expansion of the human population .
Enormous research efforts have been made to understand and reverse desertification but, until recently, and with one remarkable exception, to no avail. That exception, Operation Hope, has transformed 6500 acres of of parched and degraded grasslands in Zimbabwe into lush pastures replete with ponds and flowing streams - even during periods of drought.
Surprisingly, this was accomplished through a dramatic increase in the number of herd animals on the land. Behind Operation Hope is an approach called holistic management which is applied to rangeland pratice. It has been developed over fifty years by Allan Savory, a former wildlife biologist, farmer, and politician. It takes pretty much the exact opposite approach to the dominant theory that desertification is caused by overgrazing.
Savory's approach is based on a singular insight: grasses can't graze themselves. Before man came along, herbivores co-evolved with perennial grasses. “When a large herd moved around freely – accompanied, that is, only by pack-hunting predators - they dunged and urinated with very high concentration on the grass. No animals like to feed on their own feces, so they had to move off of their own feces within 1-3 days and they could not return until the dung had weathered and was clean again”.
Moving across the land in large herds, the herbivores trample and compact soils in much the way that a gardener does to encourage plant growth - while also fertilizing the soil with concentrated levels of nutrient-rich animal wastes. This approach aligns itself with nature a comprehensive way; it increases plant growth and also re-establishes livelihoods through additional livestock, and increasing wildlife populations through holistic management.
Grasses depended on herbivores to help them with their decay process. When large herbivores such as Kudu and Cape Buffallo, disappear, grasses begin to decay far more slowly through oxidation. When millions of tons of vegetation are left standing, dying upright, the result is to block light from reaching growth buds; the next year, the entire plant dies. The death of grass leads to bare ground, and desert spreads.
] Hooves, not tractors
Savory has not been wholly alone in his understanding of the importance of compacting on the health of vegetation. In the early 1970s, land grant universities in Texas and Arizona designed machines to simulate the physical effects of once prevalent vast herbivore herds – such as the millions of bison that roamed North America.
These machines, such as the Dixon Imprinter, were put into operation over thousands of acres of the western U.S to break soil crusts and cause indentations and irregularities while laying down plant material as soil-covering litter vital to soil health. Imprinting as the technique is called, is still practised.
But having observed observation of large wildlife herds close-up over more than fifty years, Allan Savory is convinced that animal hooves, mouths and digestive systems do this same task more effectively; the process can be repeated annually, and at no cost; and the process consumes no fossil fuels.
Large herbivores do three important things. They:
1. Break soil crusts: Trackers have observed this for thousands of years. The effect is more pronounced when animals are concentrated in large herds - which is how they behave when under threat from from pack hunting predators. The broken crust allows soil to absorb water and to breathe; this enables more plants to germinate and establish.
[Operation Hope runs livestock in a ‘predator-friendly manner’. Lvestock are held every night in portable lion-proof corrals (known as kraals in southern Africa). The kraals are portable to prevent excess dung and urine becoming pollutants. “We do not kill the lions, leopards, hyenas, wild dogs or cheetah" says Savory; "they are present because they are crucial to keeping wildlife moving and thus the land healthy”].
2. Compact the soil under their hooves: “Anyone who has had a horse stand on their boot understands this” jests Savory. Compaction is required for good seed-to soil-contact, which increases germination. The need for compaction is why gardeners tamp down the soil around seedlings or seeds, or some farmers put a heavy roller over certain crops after planting.
3. Return standing grass plant material (dead or alive) to the soil surface earlier than the same plant material would have returned to the soil had the animals not been there. One has only to watch a cow or buffalo trample or dung to know this. (Which this writer will henceforth do).
In short, the conversion of plant material to litter or dung is essential to maintain biological decay. Machines designed to imitate animals cannot do this.
] Time, not numbers
Seasonal rainfall grasslands require periodic disturbance for overall health. Savory also discovered that overgrazing was a function of time, not of animal numbers. For example, trampling for too long powders soil; this increases erosion by wind and water. Trampling for too long also causes compaction in deeper layers that is adverse to plant growth. And dung and urine, like most things in excess, become pollutants as feedlot animal producers soon learn.
But as Savory explains, “whether there is one cow or a thousand does not on its own determine the degree overgrazing; what changes the number of plants overgrazed is time - if the animal(s) remain too long in the same place, or return to it too soon following grazing”.
] Graze/trample ratios
The holistic planned grazing practiced in Operation Hope is therefore based the application of high physical impact – trampling, dunging and urinating – in short periods, separated by much longer periods for plants and soil life to recover. The aim is to minimize overgrazing by maintaining a high graze/trample:recovery ratio on the land at all times - generally no more than three days grazing always followed by three to nine months of recovery.
Because they manage holistically, Operation Hope team herders do not apply abstract time regimes. They concentrate livestock over brief time periods either to break soil surfaces, compact soil to ensure seed germination or cycle annually dying plant material biologically and rapidly.
Savory’s use of increased livestock to reverse desertification runs against ten thousand years of agricultural development. “More than twenty civilizations have failed due to environmental degradation”, Savory reminds us, “and most of them had what people today would call sustainable, or organic agriculture!”
] From green revolution, to brown
Savory's work has far wider implications than desertification alone. His approach contains the elements of a new approach to agriculture.
The Green Revolution was based on high input, industrial agriculture. It involved massive inputs of petro-chemicals and herbicides, monoculture cropping, and confinement animal feeding operations. It increased global food production tremendously - but it has also tended severely to degrade its ecological and socio-cultural capital base in the process.
“The Green Revolution has not been characterized by ecological or social integrity—quite the contrary”. Charges Savory: “Horrific soil erosion, dead zones at the mouths of rivers, severely depleted levels of biodiversity, impoverished rural communities, soil fertility loss, and oxidation of soil organic matter - all these have been exacerbated by the Green Revolution”.
The good news, according to Savory, is that this can all be reversed - indeed, this is what Holistic Management practitioners have been engaged for the past 40 years. “We posit the necessity of a new ‘Brown Revolution’, based on the regeneration of covered, organically rich, biologically thriving soil, and brought to fruition via millions of human beings returning to the land and the production of food.
"Viewed holistically biodiversity loss, desertification, and climate change, are not three issues, they are one, he continues. “Without reversing desertification, climate change cannot adequately be addressed.
“The more humid and biologically productive regions of the world need to develop agricultural models based on small, biodiverse farms that imitate the natural, multi-tiered vegetation structures of those environments. This is where most of the grain, fruits, nuts, and vegetables will be produced, as well as most of the dairy products, and some of the meat".
] Wholes, not parts
Although Savory describes some of his insights as common sense, he has spent fifty years battling to make the scientific case for his approach, too. For most of this half-century, he has had to contend with intense opposition from maintream range science researchers 'proving' it does not work.
After fifty years during which the very idea of using increased livestock to reverse desertification has been rejected, a growing number of scientists now accept that the results claimed by Savory are supported by rigorous data, and that they therefore deserve to drive land use, agriculture, and development policy.
Savory’s acceptance by the mainstream is part of a profound shift in scientific thinking. He is no longer alone in realizing that transfers of energy and nutrients are innate to a ecosystem ecology. Savory's concusions are confirmed by biological studies of plants, animals, terrestrial, aquatic, and marine ecosystems and, crucially, how they interact with each other.
This new approach to science has been called holism, or emergentism - the idea that things can have properties as a whole that are not explainable from the sum of the parts that reductionist science, at its crudest, studies in isolation.
The principle of holism was concisely summarized by Aristotle in the Metaphysics: "The whole is more than the sum of its parts".
Jonathan Teller-Elsberg, a writer turning permaculture designer, explained to me why, in his view, Savory’s approach has resisted so long by the scientific mainstream. “Mainstream natural resource management systems were in essence designed to avoid or bypass complexity. They coined the term "best management practice" – but this was a a misnomer. What may be the right thing to do on a farm this year may not be next year - let alone on a different farm”.
Although their motive was good, complexity—social, environmental and economic—is the implacable reality for management and thus cannot be bypassed or avoided", Teller-Elsberg continued. "It has to be embraced through holistic planning processes”.
] Land is not linear
One of the obstacles Savory has encountered is the tendency of modern humans to make conscious decisions – planning and design, for example - in a linear way.
As individuals, we tend to be motivated a clear objective or goal. And in groups, we have created complex global organizations whose design is influenced by the same linear thinking. We manage these organizations by designing missions, or visions, that give the collective entity something to aim for in its (linear) journey forwards.
“We have been successful with developments of technology, but have failed over and over again to deal with complexity in nature and human society” says Savory. The trouble, he believes, stems from our attempts to control a world that is holistic, and fundamentally non-linear, in its makeup.
This rational, control-seeking approach makes it almost impossible to deal with such wicked problems as biodiversity loss, desertification, and climate change.
The limits of linear management are especially true of land. Says Savory: “the US enjoys the greatest concentration of scientists and wealth ever known in one nation – but she exports more eroding soil annually than all her other exports combined”.
] Wealth = soil
The only wealth that can sustain any community or nation is derived from the photosynthetic process, he says. “Wealth, ultimately, means soil. And yet ever-larger farms are said to be ‘economic’ when this is simply not true. The US claims to be feeding the world when the true position is that the US farmers are bleeding the world with their topsoil losses”.
Land - whether rangeland or cropland – cannot be managed like the production line in a car factory. “Land alone is no more manageable than is the hydrogen or oxygen alone in water” says Savory.
] Conversations, not plans
It follows from working in whole situations – when our actions are guided by complex realities, rather than by rational and abstract concepts – that what Savory terms the the “holistic goal” must change - continously.
Otherwise stated: conversations are more important than plans. In a healthy community, discussion of its holistic goals never ends. A healthy community does not aspire to create the perfect plan and then implement it; rather, the idea is to grow and develop holistic goals over time.
Each and every managed whole - people, land, money - is unique. Therefore, just as one cannot step into the same river twice because it is flowing, Holistic Management does not permit replication.
Savory traces many of his ideas back to 1924 when Jan Christian Smuts wrote Holism and Evolution’ “Smuts believed scientists would never understand nature until we understood that nature functioned in wholes and patterns of great complexity” recalls Savory; “unlike the mechanistic world view in which nature is viewed as a complicated machine with interconnecting parts. Savory is confident today that Buckminster Fuller’s thinking would have resonated with that of Smuts.
The issues raised by Operation Hope also resonate with a recent debate in the Transition Towns movement.Brian Davey, from Transiton Nottigham recently asked, “what constitutes a ‘plan’?”.
“A plan is a way of attempting to shape the future” writes Davey, “yet there is also an explicit ethos in the Transition Movement of 'letting things go where they will'. 'Letting things go where they will' implies accepting that things will unfold in unexpected ways, and being flexible to that, taking up unforseen opportunities as they arise and being prepared to abandon unrealistic aspirations along the route.
"Instead of shaping the future, this is about being prepared to be shaped by the future”.
For Allan Savory, too, holistic management is about the means rather than the ends. The ends - the goals - are almost incidental. “You might even say that the means are the ends”, he reflects; “whatever you think your goal is, the true goal is to have a process for making decisions on an ongoing basis. After all, life is an endless, ongoing process. Any so-called goal is merely one step along an infinite path”.
Posted by John Thackara at 01:20 PM | Comments (4)
May 05, 2010
"Only connect..."
Global Thermohaline Circulation
Posted by John Thackara at 09:52 AM | Comments (0)
May 01, 2010
What should design critics write about?
What issues should the next generation of design critics write about? Where and how should they do this writing? And, how will they get paid for doing so?
This is the text of my keynote talk yesterday to Crossing The Line at the School for Visual Arts in New York.
A ISSUES
"The first question is easy. You should write about humanity's new place in a catabolically-challenged world - and the kinds of future that await us.
By catabolically-challenged I mean the complex, connected and high entropy world we’re in now – the one which can't possibly be sustained into the indefinite future. Why? because it depends on perpetually growing throughputs of energy and resources that are not going to be available.
The True Cost campaign calls our economy a “Doomsday Machine”. We strive after infinite growth in a world whose carrying capacity is finite. The better the economy performs – faster growth, higher GDP - the faster we degrade the biosphere which is the basis of life - and our only home.
It’s madness. And the world is waking up to the fact that it’s madness.
The trouble is that no society in history has ever been able to reduce its consumption of resources voluntarily over the long term.
On the contrary: as Joseph Tainter has explained: when problems in a complex society, such as our’s, emerge, tackling them requires more resources - just as resources are becoming scarcer.
Another word for this is overshoot. But it’s slow motion overshoot. Not like a mouse running off a cliff in a Disney cartoon - more like a goods wagon bumping down the unpaved side of a mountain, shedding cargo and parts along the way.
Anyone traveling in Europe two weeks ago, when the volcano blew, will know what that kind of ride feels like.
John Michael Greer, another of my muses, who first alerted us to the idea of a catbolic collapse, wrote a book called The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age. Greer’s account of how our high entropy society will degrade slowly and unevenly over many decades is pretty convincing. For one thing, that’s how the Maya, the Roman Empire and other civilizations declined in the past.
"The decline of a civilization is rarely anything like so sudden for those who live through it s it looks in retrospect”, writes Greer, encouragingly; it's a much “slower and more complex transformation than the sudden catastrophes imagined by many social critics today."
Now catabolic collapse, overshoot, and the end of civilization are too abstract to make decent stories as they stand. Besides, film makers and game designers have already made the social Armageddon space their own.
The stories that do remain to be written are about the new and better being born from the ruins of the old.
By new and better, I do not mean the happy-clappy bright-green optimism promoted in some quarters the past few years. Let’s not kid ourselves that we can pre-design a smooth transition using positive thinking and green technology.
In a new book chillingly titled ‘Requiem for a Species’, the philosopher Clive Hamilton writes that “it's too late to avert catastrophic change. Our politics and institutions are too dysfunctional to make elegant adaptations. We'd better prepare ourselves for surviving as best we can".
What we’re likely to experience is decades of muddling through what Greer describes as "scarcity industrialism" – a period when we liquidate what remains of the planet's oil endowment, fossil fuels, and other nonrenewable resources.
This phase, scarcity industrialism, will morph into to a "salvage society" phase when, having depleted non-renewables, we’ll scavenge the ruins of abandoned man-made structures for their iron, steel and other raw materials.
Scarcity industrialism is well under way in India and Brazil, by the way. http://www.momentomonumento.org/en/
I’ve learned from the resource ecologies of favelas and shanty towns thyat the concept of embodied energy – emergy – stretches forwards as well as backwards in time.
Backwards, emergy measures the energy necessary for raw material extraction, transport, manufacture, assembly, installation, disassembly, deconstruction and/or decomposition. Forwards, emergy represents potential for products or componenbts to be re-purposed – without the need to mine and smelt raw materials from scratch.
And you’ll probably think I’m sad, but I can no longer look at paved surfaces without thinking about breaking them open to free the soil.
I’m describing a way of looking at the world through a fresh lens. Rather than look at the world and think about extraction and consumption, it’s about looking for ways to preserve, steward and restore assets – human and natural ones, or so-called net present assets, that already exist.
Designers have an important contribution to make. Not much, any more, as the creators of new products, buildings, and communications. New is an old paradigm.
What designers can do is cast fresh and respectful eyes on a situation to reveal material and cultural qualities that might not be obvious to those who live them.
This kind of regenerative design re-imagines the built world not as a landscape of frozen objects, but as a complex of interacting, co-dependent ecologies: energy, water, food.
Nabeel Hamdi points out that “design disturbs that which it touches…we need to give priority to the existing life and intelligence of place. There are vast latent resources in existing situations"
Hamdi, the author of "Small Change" and "Housing without Houses" is working with Habitat for Humanity on a "mind shift" - from "building shelters" to a greater appreciation for existing social and ecological assets.
What I experience, in muntiple contexts, is the re-emergence of a ethical framework.
In 1949, the American forester and ecologist Aldo Leopold proposed what he called a "land ethic" that would guide "man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it". "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community" wrote Leopold. "It is wrong, when it tends otherwise". ["Biotic community" here is another name for what we now call the biosphere].
You may argue that this is to state the obvious: That of course you respect life, and the conditions that support life.
But I stress the word unconditional. If a commitment is unconditional, it does not mean "take account of"; or "pay due respect to"; or "move steadily towards". It does not mean "minimise adverse effects on nature" - it means a target of *no* adverse effects.
"A thief who tells a judge he is stealing less than before will receive no leniency. So why do companies get environmental awards for polluting less -- even though they are still polluting?". The biomimicry entrepreneur Gunther Pauli, who I’m quoting here, is scornful of the "do less bad" school of environmentalism.
Pauli demands that we commit to Net Positive Impact – that’s to say, "economic activity where the demands placed upon the environment are met without reducing the capacity of the environment to provide for future generations”.
Otherwise stated: Leave the world better than you found it.
That kind of economy may sound fanciful- but it’s happening, out there, now.
Between the 'tech-will-fix-it' dreamers, and the 'head-for-the-hills' brigade, a third and much larger global movement is growing. Paul Hawken reckons it’s the single biggest movement on the planet, with a million or more active groups. But it’s been invisible in mainstream media. It’s certainly hard to spot from the lobby of the Ace Hotel here in Manhattan!
This movement is evident wherever people are growing food in cities, opening seed banks, or turning school backyards into edible gardens.
The movement includes people who are restoring ecosystems and watersheds. Their number includes dam removers, wetland restorers, and rainwater rescuers.
Many people in this movement are recycling buildings - in downtowns and suburbs, favelas and slums. So called ‘slack space’ activists work alongside computer recyclers, hardware bricoleurs, office block refurbishers, and trailer park renewers.
You’ll find the movement wherever people are launching local currencies. Non-money trading models are cropping up like crazy: nine thousand examples at last count. In their version of a green economy, 70 million Africans exchange airtime - not cash.
Thousands of groups, tens of thousands of experiments. For every daily life support system that is unsustainable now - food, health, shelter, and clothing -– alternatives are being innovated.
The keyword here is *social* innovation, because this movement is about groups of people innovating together - not lone inventors.
A sub-set of this movement, Transition Towns, are especially, significant. Transition initiatives, which only started a couple of years ago, are multiplying at extraordinary speed. More than 200 communities in Europe and North America have been officially designated Transition Towns, or cities, districts, villages - and even a forest.
The transition model - I'm quoting their website - “emboldens communities to look peak oil and climate change squarely in the eye". The key points is that they don't just look: Transition groups break down the scary, too-hard-to-change big picture into bite-sized chunks.
They create a community level to-do list, with an order of priorities. This plan describes the skills and resources that community will needed to cope with the challenges coming down the track; how they are to be put in place; and who will do what.
The Transition model is powerful because it brings people together from a single geographical area. These people, of course, have different interests, agendas and capabilities. But they are united in being dependent on, and committed to, the context in which they live.
A second reason the Transition model is so powerful is that it uses a process of setting agendas and priorities - the "open space" method - that is genuinely inclusive of all points of view.
For every daily life support system that is unsustainable now - food, health, shelter, journeying - any alternative has to be system-wide, and involve a variety of different stakeholders who will not, as a rule, have worked together before.
B The second question Alice put to me concerns 'modes of critical practice available to critics'.
To answer that question I have to tell you about tomatoes. We have an allotment garden near my home in France, and I decided this year basically to copy the way my neighbour, Pedro grows his tomatoes. I studied the bamboo supports structure, and the way his beds are laid out in such a way that water can flow easily from the canal that runs past our gardens. Having but a similar bed on our patch I proudly planted 60 tomato seedlings. But then, disaster. Whe I opened the water pipe from the canal, I realized that my beds, unlike Pedro’s, are a foot above the water level. My plants will have to be watered by hand using doens of heavy cans. The reason? I had looked at the form and structure of Pedro’s system – but not at its position in the soil, and I did nt think once about the role of gravity in moving water from the canal.
https://www.practicalaction.org/mus-water-irrigation-nepal
The lesson of my tomato debacle is this: perception and understanding is both embodied, and situated - and this goes for writing, too.
Where you write is as important as what you write. Where you are from is often as interesting as what you have to say. Place gives a writer strength as much as it gives natural systems strength.
Disconnect from place and context is one of the reasons global systems have become so vulnerable. Man-made systems are attenuated, hyper-connected and interdependent - but not resilient. They depend on high throughputs of energy, and we have systematically sought to remove human agency from their day to day operations.
Think how parlous is our food security. Think about what one volcano did to global travel.
So my suggestion about where to write, would be: select a bioregion as your patch.
A bioregion is defined by the Interconnectedness, and the interdependence, of its natural systems. It's an ideal context in which to explore what co-dependency with one’s place, for people, can mean.
Many bylines these days decribe a story's writer as 'London-based,' or 'Tokyo-based'. My reaction when I read them these days is to think: "so?".
Think how different it would be to describe yourself as 'Central Valley BioRegion based writer' if you're from that part of California; or a Hudson Valley Watershed based writer, if you're based in New Jersey.
In Norway you could be a writer based in the Caledonian Buckling.
Me? I'm a writer based in the "Steppic BioRegion" [ formerly known as Occitania, or south west france].
Alice also asked me to say something about the proliferation of channels we now have to choose from.
I’m happy to oblige: The transition towards sustainability is not about messages, it's about activity. It’s not about proclamations, it’s about practices.
Many professional designers are in the representation business, so their default response in recent times has been to design a poster about sustainability. Or maybe a website filled with green things to buy.
But projecting more signals into an already cluttered environment is like throwing confetti into a snowstorm.
Advertising folk respond to what they call “the clutter problem” by adding to it.
Social media? They're part of the clutter conundrum too. Online communications are a mode of publication, not of conversation. The number of bloggers is growing at 35%; the number of people using the internet is growing at 10%. Do the math!
Emitting messages, however clever and evocative they may be, is not the same as being with real people, in real places, who are changing their lived material reality.
That's why I have a radical proposal: Consider speaking your words in a place rather than pressing "send".
Ivan Illich believed that our culture started to go off the rails in 1120, when monks stopped reading texts aloud to each other and became solitary scholars.
When I first read those lines of Illich, 20 years ago, I thought the guy was nuts. Later, when he told me in person, I listened harder. Embodied, situated, and unmediated communication, he explained, was the norm before we invented writing - and, later, mass media - - and later still, social media.
Barely three generations ago, one out of ten words that a man had heard when he reached the age of twenty were words spoken to him directly—one to one, or as a member of a crowd—by somebody whom he could touch and feel - and smell. By the 1970s, that proportion had been reversed: About nine out of ten words heard in a day were spoken through a loudspeaker.
“Computers are doing to communication what fences did to pastures and cars did to streets,” said Ivan Illich told 1982. Are social media playing a similar role today?
For Illich, there was a huge difference between a colloquial tongue—what people say to each other in a context, with meaning—and a language uttered by people into microphones. Or typed onto a Facebook page.
When someone we trust tells us to our face that a thing is important, we pay attention. Conversation is usually a more powerful medium for provoking change in behaviour than pre-packaged messages projected at us by media.
Conversation matters more than content.
Out there in the bioregions, and especially among folk like the Transition Towns groups, face-to-face is key.
There’s a continuity ere between today’s social radicals and the avant gardes of art in earlier times. For years, artists fought to bridge the schism in Western culture that separates the creator from the spectator. The Constructivists, Dadaists, Surrealists, Lettrists, and Fluxus artists all fought in different ways against the idea that art was about the creation of beautiful, static forms.
As Guy Debord put it: ‘representation separates life from experience'.
And the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that perception is a process in which an active body enters into a “communion” with its surroundings.
I empathise especially with the Lettrists, who invented a technique called hypergraphics,or super-writing. Their technique merged poetry, as text, with more visual graphic ways of communication such as painting, illustration or signs.
Rather as traveling storytellers have been doing in Rajastan for 2,000 years.
Part C
I've given you what I think are some terrific story leads:
the catabolic collapse of industrial civilization;
the design agenda for a salvage society.
The replacement of a doomsday machine economy with a solidarity economy
I've also suggested new ways to think about where and how to write
Making a bioregion your patch - and making a virtue of the spoken word.
But Alice’s third and final request was more grounded: would I please point to some "areas of hope in these students' future careers" - - - which I take to be a polite way of saying: how does a design critic get paid these days?
Some years ago, when the dot.com collapse was in full gory progress, I was at conference with Erik Spiekerman, the well-known German typographer and designer.
Erik showed some us exquisite work he'd done for blue chip cultural and business clients, such as typefaces for the German Railways, or the Berlin Underground. We were all duly impressed.
But then a young design student stood up and said: "it's all easy for you, Mr Spiekerman: you're famous; you can cherry pick the clients you want to work with; and they have to pay what you ask. But I'm young [said the student]; I'm unknown. And the economy is collapsing. What am I supposed to do?".
Erik stood up and told the meeting about the unglamorous jobs he did - but never usually mentioned - in order to keep his studio afloat. I ememebr his candid comments t this day – and I owe you similar honesty today.
If some of you think I've got it made, you need to know that well, I’m still on the make. Some reality checks:
In my capacity as a portfolio worker, I’m earning far less now, than I did up before 2007.
I'm paid for 25%, at most, of the of the hours I work. I don't get paid for writing my blog, or my newsletter. I don't get paid for organizing Doors of Perception events.
I do get paid to give talks to industry events – and I’m rather proud of that line of work. And I learn far more from hanging with people in a new industry than I do at most design events. But that market too is most charitably described as soft.
I also work as an event producer – like a film producer, only for festivals. Here my client has tended to be a city government or government agency. Projects I've done like Dott 07 in England, or City Eco Lab in France, have been timely, popular, and well-received - but it's harder now, not easier, to get projects like that funded.
I’m sorry if you were expecting me to share get-rich-quick revelations – with you. The reality, I know, is more of a cold shower: I’m probably as puzzled about how to earn a living as you are.
But let me share also what keeps me going, and why I am optimistic about the prospects for everyone here today.
The main thing is there a need for what we do:
No one has time to think. There's opportunity in that.
Society needs to take a longer view. We can help with that, too.
Adaptive resilience as a script that needs to be re-written - continuously.
So-called 'worker correspondents' were important during the 1920s in revolutionary Russia and Weimar Germany when they collated materials on issues affecting their workplace and other aspects of everyday life.
During the Depression years here, a good number of writers were involved in agricultural extension services.
As I said, The main thing is there a need for what we do – even if the business model to pay us to do it remains eternally emergent, but emerged.
I am also comforted by the fact that we are not alone. Spare a thought - if not your sympathy - for the media empires of the world. They're desperate for an answer to the question: how - selling what kind of content, and using using what business model - can big newspaper groups survive?
Empires are complex, far-flung, and active on multiple fronts. That's what makes them an Empire, and it goes for media empires too. But it takes an enormous flow of resources to keep them afloat.
They are high entropy operations. Just like Rome.
And those resources are just not there. Many have given up on selling news. People simply won't pay for it. Ad revenues have also collapsed.
Media emperors do believe that customers will pay for "actionable insight". This is why Reuters recently paid $18m for a multi-authored financial blog called BreakingViews. Not news: views. Subscribers are sent several well-crafted 350-word texts a day to their Blackberry.
But selling 350 word stories online is not a replacement for fat ad-filled newspapers. NYTimes.com generates about $15 million or so a month, which translates as so about a dollar a unique visitor a month. But their fixed costs are so high that can't make profit on that. Huffington Post, as a comparison, makes about 12 cents a unique visitor per month. And they're finding it hard to make a profit, too.
Now think of your own position. No huge office building to pay for; no executive suite; no accounts department; no human resources; no private jet; no lobbyists. In fact, if you decided to squat rather than rent or buy a space to live in. If you were aggressively to share - rather than own - the tools and resources you need for daily life.
In that case, your fixed costs can be as near as dammit to zero. Zero costs is a good place to start. Try to stay right there. When your costs are zero, how many multiples of 12 cents a month do you actually need, to survive? or, when you get established, how many single dollars do you really need?
But even that may not be the answer we’re looking for. If, as I’ve suggested here todaty, the future needs to be about conversation, not content - then maybe asking how to get paid to write is the wrong question.
Maybe our salvation will be to be paid to listen.
Posted by John Thackara at 03:15 PM | Comments (5)
