tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1334849659163883527.post4529995835702636742..comments2024-03-28T00:26:54.906-07:00Comments on SOLAR CITIES: Andy Posner's "Two Way Street" and how video games could help us rethink "poverty, pollution and prosperity"...T.H. Culhanehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02974539190597507374noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1334849659163883527.post-10538465028181097902007-12-01T10:30:00.000-08:002007-12-01T10:30:00.000-08:00I think another important on-ramp to the two way s...I think another important on-ramp to the two way street is green job creation. THis is something that Van Jones of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland has pointed out numerous times. America certainly has its poor, and they can't care about polar ice caps, deforestation and slums in Cairo until they have meet their lower-order needs of job/fiscal security, safety and so on. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenback, in their provocative book "From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility," point out that the traditional environmentalist view is that things will have to get a lot worse before they get better--in other words, once environmental problems become so visible as to be impossible to ignore, the rational response will be for people to take action. They argue, however, that things with have to get a lot better before they get better. Why? Because only then can people contemplate the larger picture of how their actions correspond to global issues such as poverty and climate change. However, I disagree with them as well. I would say: things have to get better as they are getting better! In other words, we need to completely rethinking development, poverty alleviation, and so on, by envisioning them as opportunities to bypass the kind of silly development we underwent in the U.S. It is often pointed out by Kurt Teichert that cities in the U.S. in the 60's looked a lot like cities in many developing countries today. The reason U.S. cities today are relatively clean, according to Norhaus and Shellenback, is that the U.S. experienced a boom in prosperity between the 40's and 70's, and THAT is what led to the clean air and water acts. This reminds a lot of the great book Freakonomics. One of the more intruguing arguments in that book is that crime rates were not reduced in New York City in the 90's thanks to better police enforcement (though that helped), rather, crime rates were reduced due to the Roe V Wade decision! Why? Because Roe V Wade prevented a lot of unwanted pregnancies; those children would have come of age around the time that the crime rates started to drop in NY and around the country. There is a strong parallel between the argument that environmental laws were passed in the 70s because americans had gotten wealthier, and the argument that crime rates dropped in the early 90s because Roe V Wade prevented millions of unwanted pregnancies.<BR/><BR/>I bring all this up because I think it is possible to view development much like Thomas Kuhn views scientific advancement in "THe Structure of Scientific Revolutions;" He points out that rather than being linear, science is actual non-linear in how it advances knowledge. Can we view developmen tin the same way? Years of spinning our wheels, coming up with a few success stories here and there, and then boom, an Einstein appears and we find a way to rapidly scale up open source development by engaging the entire world community to deal with climate change and poverty in one fell swoop. Sound ambitious? The way we thought about the world before Einstein seems quaint compared to how we view it now. I'm not proposing a revolutionary scientific theory; i'm simply talking about a different perspective on development, a perspective that echos Martin Luther King in his "Letter From a Birmingham Jail." In it, he blasts those that were asking blacks to be patient when they were dying and suffering; and so I say, how dare we be patient abotu poverty, injustice, dirty water, dirty air and deforestation? (we can view this as an example of "modding" MLK's great letter!) <BR/><BR/>WOw, i'm onto somethign here now. . .Up until now, it's been really hard to create a movement around climate change because how does one protest an odorles, colorless and harmless gas that is naturally occuring? But when we mod martin luther king, when we completely reframe the issue into one of human prosperity, wealth and happiness, then there is something very clear, not to protest, but to celebrate. We should celebrate humanity and open source development can do that. We should be extremely impatient, but we have to be visionaries, not prophets of doom.<BR/><BR/>And that is my 10 cents worth!Andyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09124089181201408152noreply@blogger.com