Green Metropolis by David Owen

Urban Farms and Locavorism

On pages 300-304, David Owen gives a compelling argument about why locavorism is actually an energy-intensive, inefficient way to produce food:

"The distance that a particular food item travels between its grower and its ultimate consumer is not a accurate measure of the amount of energy that was required to put it on the table...The California raspberries I purchase at my grocery store have a smaller carbon footprint than the local raspberries I picked recently at a farm just a couple of towns away, because the California raspberries crossed the country in a shipment containing tons of other produce and therefore represent a minute expenditure of fuel per berry, while the local raspberries were obtained by my wife and me during a thirty mile round-trip in a car whose only other cargo was ourselves" (p. 300).

Owen goes on to further develop the idea that costs other than those of transportation such as labor, fertilizers, etc. must be counted when the cost of locally-produced food is calculated. He also criticizes Dickson Despommier's idea of "vertical farming" for creating wasteful infrastructure needed to build vertical farms in the city since Owen feels Manhattan land could be used for more valuable things than farming.

Interestingly enough, Despommier was one of the speakers at the Municipal Art Society Urban Farming panel that I attended on November 4th and he discussed vertical farms (his book about them will be published next year). He advocated building the farm as a working component of the building design. For example, greenhouse gases from the farm would be used to heat the building. One building being discussed would have a cafe that used only food grown in the building's farm.

Another speaker on the panel mentioned that if all the yards in the five boroughs were used to grow food, then 750,000 people could be fed from it. Despommier talked about the enormous amount of grey water that NYC produces every day - enough, if treated (in my opinion) to water those yards while growing water-hungry vegetables. Other panelists talked about rooftop gardens but warned that the structure of the roof must be able to accommodate the weight of wet soil. While it would be pricey to retrofit roofs, it is possible for new buildings, like the one being discussed, could be designed with the idea of a roof garden. However, as Owen points out, the increased load-bearing capacities of the roof design would be an extra cost to be factored into the cost of any food that it produces.

Green Metropolis: What the City Can Teach the Country About True Sustainability by David Owen

Introduction and disclaimer:

I read this book last month when I was on vacation. I had just stayed up to six AM because of a twelve hour marathon of season 4 of Doctor Who, slept for eight hours, and awoke at 2 PM with a migraine. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, the sky was blue, and I had not yet gotten out of bed. Overcome with guilt, I decided to read an educational book with my coffee and picked Green Metropolis since it appeared to advocate cities. Amazingly enough, after one hour I felt the need to go to my nearby park and commune with nature in its relatively wild oak forest. I'm not sure how happy that urge would make David Owen.

In the first chapter, David Owen admits that he and his wife, empty-nesters, live in a large house in a small town in Connecticut. He uses a huge amount of heat and energy. He drives everywhere and uses big box stores. I appreciated his disclosure of his lifestyle, which directly contradicts what he advocates in his book. As such, I wish to make a disclosure statement about myself before I lead this virtual discussion.

I live in a one-bedroom apartment in Queens in a pre-war building. I use lots of paper towels, strip-mined cat litter, and plastic bags daily while taking care of my elderly cats. I don't feed them organic cat food (they refuse to eat the expensive food or use PC cat litter). I also don't use energy-saver light bulbs since the day when one of the cats broke a lamp, and ran in with a piece of broken light bulb as a present for me. Since these bulbs contain mercury, I don't want them where the cats get mercury on their mouths or paws. I recycle, I am not a vegetarian, and I can rarely make it to a farmer's market because there are few in Queens and I usually work Saturdays. I decided not to join a CSA since there are none where I work and I would have to take time off from work to pick up my order at a distant location.

Tonight I will be attending a Jane Jacobs Forum lecture at the Municpal Art Society about urban farming:

http://mas.org/designing-urban-farms-to-feed-new-york/

Tomorrow will be my first post where I discuss David Owen's views on urban farms as well as what I've gathered from my own research and the lecture.

Self, Identity and Free Will

Self and Identity have great relevance when we think of ourselves in terms of our political and social identities and their implications. We consciously or unconsciously, adapt to our given identity at various stages of self-development. Self-development can be conceptualized in a variety of ways depending upon which developmental psychologist you refer to i.e. from pre-conventional to conventional to post-conventional (Lawrence Kohlberg), or from egocentric to ethnocentric to world-centric (Jane Loevinger), or from mythic to rational to pluralistic (Gene Gebser) etc. Identity or perhaps more accurately, our current stage of development, influences us in our everyday life choices--choices that can range from mundane to momentous, from love to hate, from peace to war. For instance, religious, national and ethnic identities have been and continue to be major factors behind choices which lead to conflict and violence. But our choices may seem to us as if they were based on reason and “free will” rather than some unconscious or rationalized aspect of our identity. Since identity we are born into is a chance of birth, and every choice we make has a predominant unconscious dimension to it, how can we be sure that our choices are rational and optimal? Murathan Mungan, contemporary Turkish poet asserts that "all types of identities--ethnic, national, religious, sexual--or whatever else, can become your prison after a while. The identity that you stand up for can enslave you and close you to the rest of the world." Do you agree?

Self & Identity: Introduction

Over the last few decades, the intertwined concepts of self and identity have been systematically researched from many perspectives and some of the findings are nothing less than paradigmatic. In much of the 20th century, behaviorism and psychoanalysis dominated academic psychology but now with the emergence of cognitive science and cross-cultural research, the understandings of self and identity have made immense progress and have significant implications for matters as salient as perception and personality, ethics and education, aesthetics and politics, culture and metaphysics. Indeed, our whole experience of being in the world, as unique individuals as well as members of specific groups, is influenced by such understandings.

From one perspective, identity is the group within the self; from another perspective, it is the self within the group. Much of what we desire to do or what happens to us in the world is significantly influenced by the way world perceives us, and the way we define ourselves--consciously or unconsciously. The process of making the unconscious (biological, cultural, personal), relatively more conscious over time, is indeed what distinguishes human beings from all other animals. Perhaps the greatest benefit of the human capacity for objective self-awareness is that it allows human beings to control their own behavior, to make thoughtful choices and take full responsibility for them.

The purpose of this month-long discussion will be to disseminate and integrate some major interdisciplinary thoughts about self and identity and discern their implications for self-awareness and self-education.

Please share your thoughts and observations as we develop this discussion. Thanks.

Shop Class As Soulcraft: Critiquing Crawford

Crawford's critique of the modern working world is quite good, in my view. Unfortunately, I think that Crawford begins to stumble when he moves from critique to prescription, which at the risk of some oversimplification boils down to “big is bad, small is beautiful.” He calls for a widespread return to localized, face-to-face economic exchanges through more small entrepreneurship, a vision based in part on an overly romanticized concept of the good old days and of manual labor generally that’s probably not possible for many people to pursue.

Before I detail some of specific criticisms on this point, I'd like to pose a few questions:

1) Why do you think that the interest in manual labor that seems to have gripped the reading public is occurring now?

2) Do you think it's possible or desirable for more people to go into business for themselves as a way of avoiding the ills of modern white-collar life?

3) What about labor unions and other worker organizations? How could they help to address some of the issues Crawford addresses in his book?

4) What might citizens organize for politically in order to make work better?

Shop Class as Soulcraft: Crawford's critique of modern work

I have summarized the main points in Crawford's critique of the nature of the modern working world below, with some of my own commentary. To help guide discussion, I would like to propose a few questions:

1) What do you make of his argument that truly understanding how things work in the world requires getting one's hands dirty, so to speak? Does this idea apply only to manual labor or to other fields as well?

2) Does college really serve much of a function today besides socializing people to be "good workers", as Crawford argues, or does it continue to educate students into being good citizens and well-rounded human beings as well? If you have attended college or are currently in college, does his criticism reflect your experience as a college student?

3) If you are or have been a white-collar knowledge worker, has your working life been impacted by the threat of outsourcing/offshoring or the process of degradation that Crawford describes? If so, how?

4) Is there a relationship between the degradation of work as Crawford sees it and the state of our polity and culture? What might some of the broader social effects of a degraded working life be?

5) What do you make of Crawford's critique of consumerism?

Feel free to comment on my commentary as well.

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For Crawford, the central problem of modernity is a struggle for individual agency, that is, the capacity of human beings to have some sort of control over the things that have the biggest impact on their lives. Work definitely falls into this category, as we spend most of our waking hours engaged in it, preparing for it, and recovering from it. But the nature of the modern world constantly undermines this goal. “Both as workers and as consumers, we feel we move in channels that have been projected from afar by vast impersonal forces,” Crawford observes. “We worry that we are becoming stupider, and begin to wonder if getting an adequate grasp on the world, intellectually, depends on getting a handle on it in some literal and active sense.”

Because many of us in advanced capitalist countries are engaged in occupations that don’t involve the production of any tangible, material goods, we often don’t know exactly what is expected from us in our work or what its larger purpose is, and this situation can create serious psychological and social trauma. As Crawford observes of young people entering the working world, “the college student interviews for a job as a knowledge worker, and finds that the corporate recruiter never asks him about his grades and doesn’t care what he majored in. He senses that what is demanded of him is not knowledge but rather that he project a certain kind of personality, an affable complaisance. Is all his hard work in school somehow just for show – his ticket to a Potemkin meritocracy? There seems to be a mismatch between form and content, and a growing sense that the official story we’ve been telling ourselves about work is somehow false.”

For decades, we have been told by supposed experts that to avoid a life of mindless toil and the possibility of deskilling and offshoring, pursuit of a college education and a white-collar, “knowledge work” is necessary. But scientific innovation has made any job that can possibly be done remotely through advanced communications technology subject to export and to relentless deskilling and degradation, not just blue-collar manufacturing work. Somewhat surprisingly for a conservative, Crawford draws on the work of Marxist economic historian Harry Braverman to analyze the way capitalist industrialization has effected the separation of thinking from doing wherever possible and to provide caution to those who don’t see the value of work that can’t be outsourced or deskilled. “If you need a deck built, or your car fixed, the Chinese are of no help, Crawford notes impishly, “because they are in China.”

Paradoxically, by promoting a vision of liberation from responsibility through technologically mediated production on one hand and rampant, compensatory consumerism on the other, contemporary society actually makes us less free by subordinating us to the power of the market. As Crawford argues, “the activity of giving form to things seems increasingly the business of a collectivized mind, and from the standpoint of any particular individual, it feels like this forming has already taken place, somewhere else… But because the field of options generated by market forces maps a collective consciousness, the consumer’s vaunted freedom within it might be understood as a tyranny of the majority that he has internalized.” If anything, the critique of commodity fetishism advanced by Marx one hundred and fifty years ago and echoed here by Crawford has only become more relevant and terrifying.

All this has a literally demoralizing effect on working people, and educates us into a certain way of looking at the world and our jobs. “Degraded work entails not just dumbing down but also a certain unintended moral reeducation…We have all had the experience of dealing with a service provider who seems to have been reduced to a script-reading automaton. We have also heard the complaints of employers about not being able to find conscientious workers. Are these two facts perhaps related? There seems to be a vicious circle in which degraded work plays a pedagogical role, forming workers into material that is ill-suited for anything but the overdetermined world of careless labor.” Needless to say, this moral and intellectual degradation makes many of us ill-suited to participate fully and effectively as citizens in a supposedly democratic society that is less responsive to the needs of its people as it becomes increasingly dominated by corporate power.

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford

If this recession has taught us anything, it’s that what used to be glowingly described as the Great American Jobs Machine may be beyond repair. The state of job market is so devastatingly bleak that pundits and economists celebrated when the economy shed 247,000 jobs in July, instead of the 600,000 to 700,000 jobs per month it hemorrhaged earlier this year. While I suppose it’s good that the economy sucks somewhat less these days, all signs point toward a jobless recovery. The official unemployment rate remained steady at just under 10 percent, but the Labor Department’s broader and less heralded measure that takes into account the underemployed and “discouraged workers” who have stopped looking for jobs is over 16 percent. Even more discouraging is the news that the problem of long-term unemployment is sharply intensifying. The number of Americans unemployed for 15 weeks or more was 7.88 million, the highest figure ever recorded, and the average unemployed person has been jobless for over 25 weeks. Giddy talk about “green shoots” has obscured the fact that even if the recession ends on paper in the next couple of months, its effects are going to linger in the everyday lives of (possibly) working people for years to come.

But even if Team Obama can restore the status quo ante and succeed in getting the Great American Jobs Machine going again, would that be such a great thing? After all, in the halcyon days of the late 1990s and the pre-recession boom, many of America’s fastest growing occupations were the kind that Barbara Ehrenreich took on in her book Nickel and Dimed - highly precarious service sector jobs that pay little, provide minimal or no benefits, and are physically and psychologically enervating. Even many of us fortunate enough to have made our way into the cadre of white-collar “symbolic analysts” at the heart of an information-driven economy became subject to the same deskilling and off-shoring that has decimated the ranks of America’s blue-collar working class over the last three decades. The lean, mean Great American Jobs Machine of business press lore tended to resemble a meat grinder more than anything else for most of us.

The time is ripe for a wide-ranging reevaluation of the ways in which we go about securing our livelihoods in the world, and the book publishers of the English-speaking world seem to agree. In recent months, a spate of books on work has hit the shelves, including Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford.

By now, anyone with any exposure to Crawford’s book probably knows at least something of the man’s background. The marketing department at Penguin Books certainly won’t let us forget. Educated in political philosophy at the University of Chicago, he renounced his sinecure as the head of a Washington think-tank (as far as I can tell, it was related to the conservative American Enterprise Institute in some fashion) to retire to Norfolk, Virginia to open his own vintage motorcycle repair shop. While many reviewers have conceived of the book primarily as some sort of self-help or career advice manual, Shop Class as Soulcraft is an engaging, fairly serious work of ethical and moral inquiry and sociopolitical criticism.

Crawford’s position is deeply conservative, but unlike many contemporary conservatives he has a deep skepticism about the goodness of modern corporate capitalism. He seeks to conserve what he sees as the best aspects of work generally and the manual trades in particular from the relentless onslaught of corporate power and the culture of consumption, which he sees as the most dangerous current threats to individual liberty rather than the state. Don’t fret, however. The book is not always as heavy as my description so far might make it out to be. There are a number of entertaining discussions of the life and work of a mechanic, and of the absurdity of Crawford’s previous incarnations as a harried cubicle dweller.

We will explore various aspects of Crawford’s book this month, but before we get to some of his specific arguments I would like to start the discussion by inviting you all to share some of your thoughts about the nature of the modern workplace. What do you find to be the best and worst aspects of work? How do you find meaning in your work (if any)? If you could change one thing about work, what would it be? Don’t worry, I won’t share the comments with your boss!

If you can't get the book right away, I recommend checking out this recent author talk:


or this recently published article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

The Issue of Intelligence

In Outliers Gladwell addresses the question of IQ during the discussion of success and builds a case for it being secondary to other factors such as social skills and “social intelligence.” He gives several examples of people who did not becoming successful in spite of incredible IQ levels because of their socioeconomic class and how that affected the parenting they received. Remember the man who just couldn’t communicate well enough to jump the hurdles of academic rules and now, although he thinks and writes with his amazing level of ability, he is not a college graduate and therefore cannot get published? Juxtaposed to him was Robert Oppenheimer who was given the responsibility for the Manhattan Project even though earlier he committed acts that were illegal and hinted at mental illness. He, however had social intelligence and was able to function and achieve while many highly intelligent people cannot.

IQ has been a controversial subject for many years and is hotly debated; Gladwell seems to make a good case for why it does not guarantee success in life or that the individual will be able to use their ability that was the result of a test they took as a child. Maybe some people just have goals that don’t necessitate using the limits of their ability.

How do you stand on this issue?

Outliers Continued: Redefining Success

A few thoughts for discussion from the blog’s comments and my own curiosity about our society and success.

Someone else asked about success and happiness. It is obvious the subject is much larger than the aspects Gladwell covers but it is a great issue to discuss.

The question of success at the expense of others by people such as Bernard Madoff, or even Carnegie and Rockefeller whom Gladwell discusses in Outliers, is something to think about and a participant has mentioned it. Gladwell doesn’t discuss this in the book because he’s discussing particular kinds of success out of all people who have achieved what society has labeled successful. These type of people don’t seem to have any birth, place, or family advantages as the people discussed in Outliers did but they seem to have another trait in common - greed and a disregard for others.

I propose that in the 21st century our possessions define us and we have to achieve financial success to maintain a level of income, or rather credit, to support our habits. What if we weren’t constantly updating our personal technological devices and equipment? What if most people could only consider replacement when the old stuff completely died and then they had to save or spend savings which would often affect their retirement years? Planned obsolesce has turnover phases of months for some electronics.

Books and TV shows on organizing our “stuff” are extremely popular. There are at least three TV shows that have been running for several seasons and a previous one which ended after several seasons. Could we be happier if we were forced to live lives with fewer possessions and redefine success?

Debbie Pecora

Outliers: Introduction

Malcolm Gladwell has done it again. He’s created another bestseller that gathers together facts and situations that often seem unrelated but with his vision on sociology and psychology create a fascinating new way to study subjects. In Outliers the subject is success. What does it take for one person or group to stand out from the rest of us? From Canadian hockey players to the Beatles his thesis is convincing.

When first read the term outliers seems a strange title because the word is not familiar to most people but instead of simply defining it he begins by relating the fascinating example of the small Pennsylvanian town that doesn’t fit any of the usual patterns of health because, as it turns out, of its totally unique culture of an intricate social life in which the intimate relationships among the citizens results in long and happy lives. They are the first example of outliers.

As with his previous successful bestselling books The Tipping Point and Blink, which remain very popular at bookstores and especially at our library years after being initially published, his unique viewpoints on society and his writing style make Outliers a fascinating view of society. Readers can’t wait to see what topic he will next tackle.

As an aside, our statistics for how many bloggers are reading our site are huge compared to the number of people who actually participate in the discussions. Please join in with your opinions and observations. Any thoughts and opinions are welcome and create conversation on the blog. Please participate and help create a lively discussion with a variety of viewpoints. Thanks