Nowtopian

Nearing the half-century mark I coincidentally find myself reading articles and books that are really pushing my ruminations towards a wider narrative on time itself. As in, it waits for no one, but also as in how narrow our collective focus and attention span is in this strange moment in history.

Rebecca Solnit has written a lot about slowing down and noticing things and in the Jan-Feb issue of Orion magazine (her piece is only in the print version, unfortunately) she has a nice column on the slow-motion demise of the WTO, framed against our fairy-tale expectations of monsters being vanquished quickly and dramatically by heroes. She mentions time-lapse photography of plant growth as an example of the wrong kind of teaching, not because it’s not useful to see a plant’s growth cycle in a minute, but because of how it contributes to compressing our attention spans and raising our expecations of quick resolutions to things that take longer than what we expect or want. By contrast, we are NOT taught to see things in their real time, which might be a season in the case of a plant, or a generation in terms of an eco-niche, or multiple lifetimes in the case of historic periods or great social movements.

The WTO’s unravelling is one of the big untold stories of this era, but there’s a very good overview of the retreat from globalization that the WTO story is just a part of by eminent critic Walden Bello cross-published in Asia Times and Counterpunch. The glib assumption that the monocultural March of Regress as shaped by Wal-Mart, Disney, et al, will just keep going is one trumpeted by the mainstream media incessantly, but weirdly shared by many critics and radicals too. For all his gloomy naysaying and overly ardent embrace of peak oil as a causative historic event, James Kunstler is still a useful read to remind us of how out of kilter things are, and how obviously unsustainable the last half century’s burst of suburbanization has been. His year-end look back and forward was an interesting read, as is his piece in the aforementioned Orion magazine, “Making Other Arrangements,” about the necessity of reorienting our lives to a logic not based on endless supplies of cheap oil. The comment he makes in both pieces that really jumped out for me has to do with the crappy construction of suburbia, all made from chipboard and vinyl, not likely to last more than a generation or more. This is the much-vaunted “housing boom” that has sustained the increasingly hollowed-out U.S. economy for the past 15 years. Not only is it crappy housing that will fall apart after a few bad storms or floods, but it’s usually built on our rapidly diminishing arable lands, turning what was once prime agricultural fields into endless miles of tacky, alienating, short-term sprawl.

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