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Reflecting on the ways that swallows move about the earth reminded me of the time, in 1996, when Ivan Illich agreed to speak at Doors of Perception in Amsterdam. Our theme that year was ‘speed’. The philosopher surprised us by bringing along two fellow speakers: Sebastian Trapp, a field biologist, and Matthias Rieger, a musicologist. As Illich described their approach at the time, “we went back into history to distance ourselves from modern certainties, to see whether we could find speed outside our speedy society”.  The three texts were revised after the conference – and each one is as  fresh today as the day we heard them in Amsterdam – so this seems like an opportune moment to run them again in three parts. 

Sebastian Trapp: Frederic the Second and the Speed of a Falcon

“In the early morning of February the 18th, 1248 the people of Parma in northern Italy attacked the enemy that had besieged them. They bursted out of their town and stormed Victoria, the city the hostile army had built and named so self-assured. They knew that the Emperor who had assailed them and his most important men were not there.

For several months the Parmesians had observed the everyday-life of their hated enemy and they knew, therefore, that the right time to attack was when the Emporer left his camp to hunt with his falcons.  The Parmesians were successful; but more than that, they not only defeated their enemy, but spoiled him of nearly everything. They took the crown that he wore on high feast days, a marvellously crafted work of art studded with diamonds and ‘as big as a pot’, as a contemporary recorded. Furthermore the seal of the King of Sicily fell into their hands, forcing him to issue several decrees in order to prevent its abuse by his opponents. The Carrocio of Cremona, a pompous waggon decorated with flags, was the most famous trophy. The enemies of the town of Cremona, which was allied to the Emperor, could not resist the temptation to take souvenirs; shortly after the victory there was little of it left but the wheels.

The only truly unique and unreplaceable booty of the expedition was not listed in the chronicles. It is a manuscript, specially prepared for the king, wrapped in leather and ornamented with gold and silver, the text embellished with paintings and miniatures. It was seen for the last time tweny years after the battle of Victoria — it is mentioned in a letter written in 1265 — and was never found again.

It is the book, On the Art of Hunting with Birds, written by the besieger of Parma himself — Frederic the Second, King of Sicily and Jerusalem, and Emperor of the Roman Empire. Because of other, lesser copies, it is still in print today.

Frederic II was a truly remarkable character. Because of his contact with Arabian scholars and his undogmatic thinking — as shown by his interest in philosophy and the natural sciences — the clergy became very much opposed him. He was excommunicated by Pope Gregory IX as being the personified Antichrist. The biographer of this Pope wrote that ‘he (Frederic) turned the title majesty in a hunting-tenancy and, instead of being decorated with arms and laws, became surrounded by dogs and shrieking birds, a hunter instead of an emperor. He traded in the sublime sceptre for the hunting-spear and released the eagle of triumph, setting aside the revenge on his enemies, on hunting birds.’

Only very few could appreciate Frederic’s work, which in many respects remains valid to this day. It is a remarkable in being based not on ear-witness and narration but skillful observation and detailed description of the observed. One of his contemporaries wrote: ‘Thanks to his extraordinary ability of mental penetration, which was occupied mainly with the understanding of nature, the Emperor composed an opus on the nature and cultivation of birds with which he proved how deeply he was devoted to penetrating investigation.’

Reading the book one cannot help but be deeply impressed with the extensive knowledge Frederic had compiled, not only on the breeding and training of the falcons he used for hunting, but also on their anatomy and their illnesses. But the scope of the huge book is much greater than that: it covers not only birds of prey, but the life of all different kinds of birds, with detailed insights into their life-cycles, their preferred habitats, their habits including their travels in autumn and wintertime and much, much more. In modern language one would say that he gives a detailed account of the anatomy, behavior and ecology of birds including a taxonomy.

In the fourth book of his Opus, Frederic describes the different ways falcons attack a standing crane. He gives his opinion on the reasons for these different tactics: ‘Of those falcons one throws against standing cranes, some fly high, others low and others again in medium altitude. […] Those, who fly high, straight and fast, do so to get faster to the crane which they choose and be able to swoop down on him harder.

‘Those who fly in a curve and fast, do so to get the best direction of the wind, if they aren’t thrown directly against it.

‘Those who fly slow and in a curve do both because of the wind and also to rouse the cranes which they don’t dare to attack on the ground. […]

‘Falcons that fly in a moderate altitude and slow do so to rouse the cranes; those who fly in a moderate altitude and fast, do so in order to reach the game as fast as possible, that is, before it flies up and away.’

Perhaps now you begin to get an idea why I talk to you about this old and little known book. After all, this is a conference on speed, not on possible grandfathers of modern natural science, be they ever so fascinating. But Frederic II can serve me as a starting point for the argument that I wish to present here. For this argument it is important that, while he may have lived long ago, he was in many ways a very modern man.

He was modern in not believing what he had not actually witnessed himself. He was modern in his attention to details and in his attempt to understand what he had seen in relation to their setting, the environment in which the observation was made. But in another respect he is very old-fashioned: he never talks about speed.

The descriptions I gave of the ways in which falcons approach the game demonstrate that clearly. He does use the words ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ to describe the falcons, but that is all. Even when he comes to rating his birds, he is only talking about the different ways to fly to the prey: ‘The high flight is the most laudable and praiseworthy one because for those falcons it is easiest to swoop down upon the game. […] Even if the cranes soar up in a distance, high-flying falcons get to them quick, precisely because they swoop down from great altitude.’

Frederic is using those words, but he never talks or thinks in terms of speed. He never compares one falcon in being faster than the other, let alone the speed of a falcon to the speed of his prey.

Today this is very much possible. In school textbooks one can read that the falcon reaches a speed of up to 200km/h, much faster than all the birds he attacks. But this – being faster than other birds – is not the reason why falcons are successful hunters. Frederic, who devoted much of his life to hunting with birds — too much of his life, many would have said — knew why they are. In fact, the idea of seeing the reason for the falcons success in his extraordinary speed could not occur to him. The reasons are two-fold: the first lies in our culture. The concept of ‘speed’ as we know it is a very recent, a very modern one. The Oxford English Dictionary gives old meanings of speed, which sound strange and alien to us: abundance, success, fortune, lot, assistance, help. Today, if somebody talks about ‘speed’, we understand it to be the property of a process, mostly a movement in time, that — at least in principle — can be measured by an instrument, by a technical device, and therefore can be compared. This notion of speed — as expressed in units like km/h or r.p.m. — connotates a uniform movement. It is a mechanical speed.

Mechanical speed was invented together with the railroad. Before this people travelled by coach. Not only did they see how strenuous it was for the horses to pull the carriage, but they themselves were shaken up and down so that at the end of the journey animals and passengers alike were exhausted. The movement was a highly irregular one; at every turn, at every obstacle the coach slowed down and after a while the horses tired and became slower.

This irregularity of the movement was seen clearly once the railroad was invented. In 1826 an advocate of the railroad described the movement of a horse as ‘limping and irregular’ and compared it to a locomotive which drives ‘uniformly and fast on its rails, not the least constrained by the speed of its movements’. It didn’t take long until the perception of travelers changed and the uniform and fast movement of the locomotive was seen as natural, whereas the nature of the animals pulling began to appear as dangerously chaotic.

Therefore it is not surprising that as early as 1825 one predicted that ‘soon the nervous man will board a wagon pulled by a locomotive and feel much more secure than he did in the time when he travelled in a coach drawn by four horses, all of them differing in strength and speed, being stubborn and uncontrollable and subject to all the weaknesses of flesh’.
So the kind of speed that we talk about today — and that we talk about at this conference — came into being more than half a millenium after Frederic’s death. He could not talk about speed in the way we do.

The second reason is much more important for me. It lies in the nature of the falcon, It lies in the nature of his prey and in the nature of nature. To talk about the speed of a falcon is an abstraction, an a priori that, at least for some purposes, can be a meaningful one. But it is also a distraction. It distracts from the way in which falcons actually hunt. Comparing the speed of the falcon and the speed of his prey leads us almost inevitably to the image of a race, with the end being the falcon reaching the other bird, and ultimately, the kill.

But a falcon should — and would — never try to outpace his prey. Frederic — who for living in the middle ages couldn’t be distracted by the modern notion of speed — saw that clearly. He knew that there are birds (he gives the example of the bittern) who, if a bird of prey would fly after them, trying to catch them, would throw their excrements towards it. Taking into account how caustic these substances can be, this would be a serious threat that any pursuer would definitely try to avoid.

So Frederic never saw the hunt with birds as being a kind of race. The quotations I gave show that clearly: He always describes the behaviour of the falcon — how it leaves the fist, how it approaches the prey, what it has in mind when choosing a certain route to the crane. He considers where the cranes stand, what they do and which method to attack would be the best for the falcon, the ‘most laudable’ one, as he puts it. In all this flying, curving and circling, the rousing and gaining altitude, the hesitating and swooping down, in all this, there simply is no place for our notion of speed.

When I say, ‘the falcon reaches a speed of up to 200km/h’ then I talk only about a very brief moment, a blink of the eye, in which the falcon approaches something that is compatible with our idea of speed — mechanical speed, that is — the moment where he darts down on the other bird, the wings pressed against its body, unable to steer and therefore moving in a straight line. This is the only moment where our idea of speed is actually applicable, and it is only this moment that is addressed in the textbook. A second later — when the claws of the falcon hit the other bird, it tumbles, catches itself, tries to gain altitude —‘speed’ again is without any real importance, even for the human observer. This also holds true for humans, at least in principle. But technology has prolonged enormously the moments of mechanical speed that we experience. We are used to sitting in a train, taking an airplane or driving along a motorway in a car. We are used to the experience of uniform, mechanical speed So much so, that for us it even makes sense to talk about the ‘speed’ of a pedestrian, even though he may stop all the time, talk to other people or look at the window of a shop. For an object moving as irregular as a pedestrian we manage by talking about ‘average speed’.

The first passengers of the railroad were irritated and confused by the uniform movement of the train, unaccustomed as they were to the sensation of speed within a machine which ridiculed their own rhythms. It took quite a while until people started to get used to places they knew floating by as a landscape, impressions that are much too familiar to us to be noteworthy. We — being transported all the time — are so much used to the kind of speed machines produce that to us ‘speed’ makes perfect sense.

Looking at a falcon high up in the sky or at a kid romping and roving about in the street, I doubt very much that this notion of speed, brought forth by the machines which humans invented, is the idea one should have in mind talking about humans themselves, about ourselves. It doesn’t really matter wether we wish the ‘speed of the human society’ to accelerate or to slow down — as long as we look at humans with speed in mind, we won’t look at humans humanely”.

Copyright: Sebastian Trapp, Matthias Rieger, Ivan Illich
For further information please contact:
Silja Samerski Albrechtstr.19 D – 28203 Bremen
Tel: +49-(0)421-7947546 e-mail: piano@uni-bremen.de

Can you help? We cannot find one single photograph of Illich, Trapp and Rieger on stage (in November 1996): if you have one, please share. 

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As an artefact, the swallows’ nest is not exactly the Taj Mahal. It’s a ramshackle structure, made of mud pellets and straw, that’s stuck crookedly to the wall. But it seems to suit them well – or rather, the surrounding habitat does.

I’m sad. The family of swallows that spent the summer in the eaves behind my office have headed south for the winter. Most of them will follow the west coast of Africa to avoid the Sahara; a few may travel further east down the Nile Valley. They’ll take it easy and stop every few miles at first to build up their fat reserves – but then they’ll speed up. In four months, as Christmas beckons here in the north, they’ll reach their destinations: Botswana, Namibia or South Africa. After just two months gorging on insects, they’ll begin the epic journey back. The strongest among them will make it back in just five weeks, traveling 200 miles a day.

And I thought my air travel was profligate.

As an artefact, the swallows’ nest is not exactly the Taj Mahal. It’s a ramshackle structure, made of mud pellets and straw, that’s stuck crookedly to the wall. But it seems to suit them well – or rather, the surrounding habitat does. Their physical abode is a safe place to park their ravenous young –  but it’s not a gated community. What brings the swallows back every year is the environment as whole: open air for easy flight; fresh water from the river; flying insects to feed themselves and their ravenous young.

When the swallows twitter excitedly overhead, I envy how lightly they manage to live. I compare their tiny needs for external energy to the prodigious amounts needed to keep us humanoids fed and watered. I contrast the way the swallows throw their nests together – from found materials – with the billions of tons of resources, often gathered from faraway lands, that we pour into our own structures. And which we basically sit in, waiting to be provisioned.

For ninety nine percent of human existence we lived far more like the swifts than we do today. We had very few possessions. Materials for shelter, clothing, and tools were all at hand. Because we needed little, we wanted little. We got by without a state, a market, or advanced technology. We thrived in the absence of strategic visions, design thinking, concepts, plans, budgets, or controls. We worked, for the most part, cooperatively. We didn’t borrow from the future. We shared.

[Above: the flyways of migratory birds. Source Wetlands International]

When my birds lined up on the telephone wires, nobody had told them to do so: They were responding to subtle changes in the light, and in the taste of the air, that I will never know.

I’m more than a little envious – but it’s time for work: I have to pack for a trip.

POSTSCRIPT
I’m happy again: a few minutes after I finished the post above these 300 sheep – each with its own bell, and accompanied by five shepherds and six dogs – strolled into town along our “dry” river: le Rieutord. They are on Day 4 of the transhumance – their annual pilgrimage from summer pastures to winter quarters. The chief shepherd has been making this journey for 32 years at the same steady pace; similar groups have being doing the same for thousands of years. Modern mobility is – well, just not the same.

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(Photo: Future Perfect, Sweden, 2011)

When Bill McKibben announced in Rolling Stone this month that, thanks to Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math, ‘global catastrophe’ is more or less assured, the world’s media responded with blanket coverage of …. Kristen Stewart’s one night stand with Rupert Sanders.

Recent headlines are no less surreal. The fact that nationwide power cuts have left 700 million people in India without electricity took second place, in most newspapers, to a row about match-fixing in an Olympic badminton match.

Priorities are weird wherever you look. A young designer friend of mine was approached, at an exhibition of graduating students in London, by a jury of  industry eminences. “Is it ready for production?” they asked him, of the work he had on show. A different question could have been, “will your design leave the world a better place?” – but that would have distracted my friend’s attention from the higher imperative of  economic growth.

So much discordant information amplifies confusion about what is, or is not, a ‘green job’. Is it green to design wind turbines, or electric vehicles, that contain conflict minerals? Is it green to design sandwiches containing healthy food that are displayed in chiller cabinets? Is it green to design a vertical farm that will erected in the middle of a desert city?

If those forms of production are iffy, what kinds of production and design do qualify as green? To try and sort out once and for all what kinds of work and jobs are truly green – and what are not – I’m running a workshop at the Ö Festival (the Future Perfect Festival) in Sweden during 23-26 August at  Waxholm Strand, Stockholm Archipelago. It would be great if you can make it.

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For some Icelanders, in a country whose inhabitants have survived 1,100 winters without central heating, the environmental costs of aluminium smelting are worth paying if the alternative is a return to a life in grass-roofed huts.

To many, that choice does not feel far-fetched. Andri Snær Magnason’s grandfather, for example, worked continuously on the land and sea in order to survive. As the author of Dreamland recalls, “my family caught fish, burned driftwood, milked cows, and herded sheep. Food was life for twenty to thirty people in a house of 1,400 square feet. Everything edible was cut and dried: One sheep represented a month and a bit of human survival next winter. That was their reality”.

The vitality of that living memory is one reason debate about Iceland’s economic future  seems to have been limited to a stark choice: sell the country, body and soul, to global energy and extractive interests – or go back to those huts.

The search for a third way was one underlying theme at last week’s Poptech in Reykjavik on the theme “Toward Resilience”.  My invitation (from Andrew Zolli) to take part afforded a welcome opportunity to re-connect with a country confronted by an agonising choice: “eaten-alive-or-growing-to-live?”.

A new lesson from this visit: the imposition of heavy industry onto a fragile ecological-social situation is an easier sell when the alternatives on offer can be portrayed as feeble. Successive politicians have played on the fact that an aluminium smelter is large, solid and reliable – whereas small-scale farming, picking moss, or selling herbal tea-bags in the airport shop, are not to be taken seriously as the basis of an alternative economy.

“People want to know that next year will be all right, and the year after” Magnason explains. “A longing for security, and fear of change and uncertainty, make people hold fast to the existence they know, however unreasonable it may be”. Put like that, Iceland’s struggle is an example of a dilemma faced by communities the world over: how to have confidence in a future based on social and environmental assets that are real – but intangible, and unmonetised.

To the visitor arriving on a cheap Icelandair flight for a short visit, the country appears to be well-off. But, as Magnason puts it, “a particular myth is fixed in the mind of the nation, the myth that we are a poor little country that needs something big to save us”.

This fear – that success may be fleeting – is not irrational. Iceland’s tourism business is booming, for example, but only because a return ticket from London today costs no more than a week’s wages for a Brit with a job. This is not a solid market. Low-cost air travel, whose business model is based on high passenger volumes and low energy costs, is unlikely to survive for long in the age of energy descent that is upon us.

Filling Iceland with server farms running on ‘clean’ energy is another business idea that, although it must sound cool  in a pitch to VCs in California, is likely to be constrained by the messy realities of energy descent. Despite its name, Cloud computing is extraordinarily resource-intensive. Whether or not the energy to run its servers can be sold as being ‘clean’ as well as cheap, the escalating costs of its infrastructure will constrain the growth to infinity that most excites potential investors.

Icelanders, who have no choice but to be creative and entrepreneurial, will of course be able to innovate replacement enterprises if tourist numbers decline, or cloud computing disappoints. But that’s not the point. The challenge is to win over a polarised society, now, to the idea that that a mosaic of small enterprises can provide the same security as is promised by resource-intensive heavy industry.

Iceland’s dilemma is not unique. The mind-set of people living in tough conditions has often been accompanied by human and ecological devastation. For more than two centuries in Australia, for example, the conflict between incoming settlers, and aboriginal peoples, was framed in terms of the doctrine of terra nullius, a Roman legal term that means “land belonging to no one,” or “empty land.” As the writer Adam Kahane recalls in his book Power and Love, it took 200 years after the first settlers arrived for the High Court of Australia to rule that its citizens had to work out a new way of living together with the indigenous people and land that had always been there.

“The two main ways that people try to solve their toughest group, community and societal problems are fundamentally flawed” writes Kahane;  “they either push for what they want at all costs, or try to avoid conflict completely and sweep problems under the rug in the name of a superficial peace”.

A post-2008 project to re-write Iceland’s constitution seems to belong in Kahane’s second category. Although much-trumpeted as “the world’s first crowd-sourced constitution”, the main outcome of this process has been a draft document of more than 700 pages that was submitted to parliament more than a year ago – and has not been heard from since. Even its authors are in the dark about what is happening to it.

I asked my cab driver how on earth such things could be kept secret in such a small country. ”Carefully”, was his reply.

A lack of open-ness (and a visceral  distrust of lawmakers) aside, the bigger problem with a written constitution is that Iceland is confronted by dilemmas, not by black-and-white alternatives. A written set of principles, on their own, will not foster the trust that will be needed among all citizens if Iceland as a social-ecological system is to work.

Andri Magnason is especially frustrated by the polarisation of debate. “You are either for electricity, or you are against it. You are for all hydroelectric schemes, or against them. If you admire power schemes built on a small scalet –  supply a city with electricity, like the one on Elliaár – you are accused of being hypocritical if you  refuse to sacrifice the pristine highlands of eastern Iceland in the interests of aluminium smelting”.

What’s needed is surely a conversation, not a contract.

This conversation needs to involve all citizens with all their different perspectives and interests. People who fear for their future economic security future need to know they are being heard. People who are fearful for the fate of the land and ecosystems they love, also need to know they are being heard.

Being heard is not the same as being forced to agree. On the contrary, as Kahane explains, “if we want to get unstuck, we need to acknowledge our interdependence, cooperate – and feel our way forward”.

One can imagine a happy outcome in which Iceland works out a way to regulate her future development. There could be quotas for energy extraction, or for tourists, in the same way there are now quotas for fish. But how to get from here to there?

As Iceland searches for new words, and new conversation formats, to ‘feel its way forward’, there are models and experiences to learn from.  These range from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa to the network of water temples in Bali (that Steve Lansing told us about at Poptech) that has enabled farmers to shared water equitably for more than 1,000 years. There are other models, too, such as the  Articulaão do Semi-Árido Brasileiro  (ASA project) that has been building water cistern in the semi-arid north of Brazil.

These are important stories, but complicated ones. I will return to them soon.  [See also “Iceland: eaten Alive or Growing To Live”  http://www.doorsofperception.com/development-design/iceland-eaten-alive-or-growing-to-live/]

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