What We Can’t See, We Can’t Consciously Change
Nobody really knows what all was on the Cosco Busan when it sideswiped one of the supports of Bay Bridge, dumping about 58,000 gallons of oil into one of the country’s most famous and fragile ecosystems. That’s because globalization is grandfathered into our consciousness.
But at what cost? Solving the converging crises of climate change and peak oil, not to mention a plethora of others, would be an exceedingly difficult nut to crack even if we had full knowledge and information. Unfortunately, cracking this nut is probably impossible with our current level of thinking and understanding. We cannot hope to apply the necessary systemic thinking to our converging crises, because no one has a full view of the system. What we can’t see, we can’t consciously change.
By Mark Henson of Sacred Light Studio
To improve our ecological and social bottom lines, we need to fully understand what is going on in our name. Our government has been hoarding information about the state of our climate and energy resources for six decades. They won’t tell us the truth, because they don’t think we can handle the truth. Our behavior supports this position. Despite the mounting evidence that we are headed for converging ecological and energy crises, we remain in the stupor of complacency, continuing to accept the globalized economy and its abstractions which hide everything about products beyond form and function. We consume, not realizing that the stories behind the materials, production, distribution, use, and end-of-use of our favorite products are fueling all of fires we want and desperately need to put out.
Recognizing the emerging need to drastically reduce dependence on fossil fuels and to curb greenhouse gas emissions as well as the need to address a variety of ecological, social, and economic issues, I have come to the conclusion that localization is a key organizing principle of the conscious evolution of our economy and culture.
Moving production closer to consumption reduces transport and therefore oil consumption and carbon emissions. Less obviously but more importantly, localization blows away the abstractions which hide everything beyond the form and function of the products we use. Once we start making things, we have to get beyond form and function and focus our attention on aspects of the product life cycle - materials acquisition, production, distribution, and end-of-life - that are not visible to consumers. Becoming producers again gives us the opportunity to begin developing ecologically balanced and equitable economic relationships, processes, systems, and institutions.
Only through localizing − taking control of the entire product life cycle and determining what gets produced and how − will we have the opportunity to co-create, explain, and celebrate positive, life-affirming stories behind the form and function of the products we use on a routine basis.
Tomorrow (25 April 2008), I speak on a panel about Energy and Economic Localization at the Ecocity World Summit At the nob Hill Masonic Center in San Francisco from 3:15-4:45pm. The other panelists are Jan Lundberg of Culture Change and Paul Fenn of Local Power. Kirsten Schwind of Bay Localize will moderate.
For more information on Localization efforts in the Bay Area, check out the social benefit organization I co-founded - Bay Localize .
[...] thoughts about the importance of localization in terms of sustainability [...]