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  • From: Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Fwd: Space Savers - monbiot.com
  • Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2017 04:05:55 -0400

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: George Monbiot <noreply+feedproxy@google.com>
Date: Tue, Jun 6, 2017 at 3:48 AM
Subject: Space Savers - monbiot.com



 Space Savers - monbiot.com <http://www.monbiot.com>
------------------------------

 Space Savers <http://www.monbiot.com/2017/06/05/%ef%bb%bf-space-savers/>

Posted: 05 Jun 2017 08:11 AM PDT

We have enough physical and ecological space for public luxury for all. But
not enough for private luxury for all.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 31st May 2017

Imagine designing one of our great cities from scratch. You would quickly
discover that there is enough physical space for magnificent parks, playing
fields, public swimming pools, urban nature reserves and allotments,
sufficient to meet the needs of everyone. Alternatively, you could
designate the same space to a small proportion of its people – the richest
citizens – who can afford large gardens, perhaps with their own swimming
pools. The only way of securing space for both is to allow the suburbs to
sprawl until the city becomes dysfunctional
<http://irows.ucr.edu/cd/courses/10/reader/New%20Left%20Review%20-%20Mike%20Davis%20Who%20Will%20Build%20the%20Ark.htm>
– impossible to supply with efficient services, lacking a sense of civic
cohesion and permanently snarled in traffic: Los Angeles for all.

Imagine designing a long-distance transport system for a nation that did
not possess one. You would find that there is plenty of room for everyone
to travel swiftly and efficiently, in trains and luxury buses (an intercity
bus can carry as many people as a mile of car traffic
<http://www.monbiot.com/2006/12/05/life-coaching/>). But to supply the same
mobility with private cars requires a prodigious use of land, concrete,
metal and fuel. It can be done, but only at the cost of climate change, air
pollution, the destruction of wonderful places and an assault on
tranquillity, neighbourhood and community life
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/08/cars-choke-communities-pollution-diesel>
.

This conflict is repeated in financial terms. So that the very rich can pay
less tax, public playgrounds are allowed to fall apart. The beneficiaries
might use the extra money to build private play barns for their children.
Public toilets are closed, so that some people can install gold-plated taps
in their bathrooms. Public swimming pools are put on restricted hours, so
that the very rich can turn up the thermostats in their private pools.
Public galleries need to charge for entry so that billionaires can expand
their own art collections. Wealth that could be shared and enjoyed by all
is sequestered by a few.

It is impossible to deliver a magnificent life for everyone by securing
private space through private spending. Attempts to do so are highly
inefficient, producing ridiculous levels of redundancy and replication.
Look at the roads, in which single people, each encased in a tonne of
metal, each taking up (at 70mph) 90 metres of lane, travel in parallel to
the same destination. The expansion of public wealth creates more space for
everyone; the expansion of private wealth reduces it, eventually damaging
most people’s quality of life.

This is a global issue, as well as a national one. According to the Global
Footprint Network, every person in the UK uses the equivalent of 5 hectares
<http://data.footprintnetwork.org/compareCountries.html?yr=2013&type=EFCpc&cn=229>
of land and sea, through the food we eat, the products we use and the
carbon we release, that has to be absorbed somewhere if it is not to
accelerate global warming. Yet the UK’s “biocapacity”
<http://data.footprintnetwork.org/compareCountries.html?yr=2013&type=BCpc&cn=229>
(our ability to absorb these impacts) equates to a little over 1 hectare
per person. Our extravagance is a cost that others must bear.

Public luxury available to all, or private luxury available to some: this
is the choice we face at all times, but especially at this election. It is
the conflict between these two visions that defines, or should define, our
political options. There is a significant difference between Labour and the
Conservatives in this respect, but I wish it were stronger.

Labour, through its proposed cultural capital fund
<https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/may/22/labour-suggests-arts-sector-could-be-brexit-bargaining-chip>,
will reinvest in public galleries and museums. It will defend and expand
our libraries, youth centres, football grounds, railways and local bus
services. Unlike the Conservative manifesto
<https://www.conservatives.com/manifesto>, which is almost silent on the
issue, its platform offers a reasonable list
<http://www.labour.org.uk/page/-/Images/manifesto-2017/Labour%20Manifesto%202017.pdf>
of protections to the living world.

But it also promises to “continue to upgrade our highways” (shortly after
vowing to “encourage and enable people to get out of their cars”) and to
provide new airport capacity. The conflicts are not acknowledged. Progress
in the 21st Century should be measured less by the new infrastructure you
build than by the damaging infrastructure you retire.

Labour also misses a wonderful opportunity, in its plans to expand
affordable housing, to promote accommodation that both revives community
and makes better use of space. In co-housing developments
<https://cohousing.org.uk/>, people own or rent their own homes, but share
the rest of the land. Rather than chopping the available space into
coffin-sized gardens, in which a child cannot perform a cartwheel without
hitting the fence, the children have room to run around together, while the
adults have space to garden and talk. Communal laundries release living
space in people’s homes. Carpools reduce the need for parking. Isolation
gives way to conviviality.

More importantly, and less surprisingly, the Labour manifesto fails to
acknowledge the left’s great conundrum: the environmental damage caused by
efforts to create jobs through economic growth. Like the Conservatives,
like almost every party everywhere (the Greens are a notable exception),
Labour’s economic vision is based on the presumption that there are no
limits. Both conservative and social democratic parties see the world as a
magic pudding that can never be exhausted. They build their economic
programmes on a fairytale
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/24/consume-conserve-economic-growth-sustainability>
.

They have another unexamined premise in common: that money legitimately
buys you the power to take what you want from the world. There is an almost
universal assumption in politics that you have the right to help yourself
to as much of the global commons (atmosphere, soil, water, fish) as you can
afford, though this reduces what is left for other people to share. You
have the right to occupy as much physical space as your money can buy,
regardless of the restrictions this imposes on others.

Where does this licence arise? Even if private wealth were obtained through
the exercise of virtue (an unlikely proposition at the best of times) or
through enterprise and hard work (ever less probable in this new age of
inheritance and rent), it is hard to discern the just principle that
translates this money into permission to acquire the space and resources on
which other people depend for a decent quality of life. When and by whom
was this permission granted? How does it correspond to our notion of equal
rights, or our concept of democracy, which is based on an equal power to
decide?

You will not find these questions asked in this election, or in any other.
They are fudged by recourse to the magical belief that there is enough
space and resources for everyone to do as they wish, that infinite growth
ensures that no one – when the parties’ economic promises are fulfilled –
will need to intrude on the interests of others. Yet, on this finite
planet, they are the questions that will determine not only the quality of
our lives but also our security and, eventually, our survival. The primary
task of all far-sighted politicians should be to decide first how much we
can use, then how it can best be shared.

When the questions that count above all others are beyond the scope of
politics, when almost everyone in public life is either too blinkered or
too frightened to answer them, when – even in this great, defining
election, that at last offers the people of this nation meaningful
political choice
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/25/vote-labour-jeremy-corbyn-theresa-may>
– neither large party can even name them, you begin to recognise how much
trouble we are in.

www.monbiot.com









--
Lawrence F. London, Jr.
lfljvenaura@gmail.com
https://sites.google.com/site/avantgeared



  • [permaculture] Fwd: Space Savers - monbiot.com, Lawrence London, 06/06/2017

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